What Does a Disaster Feel Like?

A dead bird of azure and emerald feathers was covered by a fallen leave. People are amazed by its beauty, which makes its death more disappointing. They want to give the bird a formal burial and document this “disaster”. Three steps away was a dead grey sparrow whose unimpressive appearance attracted little attention. No one bothered with a trivial loss, nor would they refer to it as a “disaster”. But who is there to say that the death of a bird without the fanciful colors is not a disaster? Who is there to say that a bird dead for other reasons (shot by hungry hunters) makes disaster more/less intense?

I took a walk around the Frost Library where supposedly I would spend my 6 weeks as a Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow. I stood at its southeast corner, gazing at the reindeer sculpture on the second floor. Just beneath the reindeer is a plate that memorializes the Library’s predecessor, Walker Hall. Constructed of fine Monson granite, Walker used to be the largest and most elaborate building on campus back in the 19th century. Through creating the timeline for disasters in the history of Amherst College, I learned Walker Hall was demolished twice: firstly, a tragic fire that gutted most parts of the building and its archived administrative records at the night of March 28, 1882; then, a less tragic, college-planned razing to make the way for the current Robert Frost Library in 1963.

[The rebuilt Walker is] more than ever, the archives, the treasury, the capitol, the acropolis of Amherst College. (Prof. W.S.Tyler, AC 1830)

The two birds re-occupied my mind. As a creator of the timeline, should I include both birds’ death as disasters, or should I include only the more beautiful one? Similarly, should I include both demolishments of Walker Hall, or only the first one, considering the second one is consciously planned, executed, and approved by the administration? Furthermore, does the arisen Frost Library make the second Walker Hall’s demolishment meaningful, therefore less disastrous? Would the raze of Walker Hall seem more disastrous than other buildings on campus?

Archivists are gatekeepers of history, and they should be conscious of their power in “rewriting” the records. To some degree, what’s not in the archive is equally as important as what’s in it. The principle of inclusion and, inevitably, exclusion challenges my definition and stereotypes about disasters. For example, if I define a disaster as an incident and/or a continuation of events that cause great damages or losses, both demolishments should be considered as disasters (the damage of Walker Hall, planned or not, was the criterion of disaster). However, if I define a disaster as an event that leads to unfortunate consequences, only the fire at Walker Hall should be recognized as a disaster (the event’s positive/negative aftermath becomes the threshold). Let Walker Hall be only one example of the decisions I have to make in creating the timeline. Should the Amherst Uprising be included as a response to a disaster or simply “disaster per se”? What about a sexual assault on campus? National disasters that would surely impact some Amherst people?

What’s a bit consoling, the word “disaster” has also evolved over time. From Italian “disastro”, literally meaning “ill-starred”, we could infer that people in the past times think disaster as a destined outcome, one that cannot be prevented or altered. Speaking with Matthew Hart, the Director of Emergency Management at Amherst, I learned that disaster research and management has been understood as a science. Yet however hard we try to apply our rationality to approach disasters, we are still caged by our emotions– fear, anxiety, uncertainty– that inherited from our notion of uncontrollable destiny. A part of the final project we deliver focuses on analyzing how writers in the Amherst Student use the word “disaster” in their reports and op-eds. Not surprisingly, writers charge the most intense emotion on the “disasters” of sports games– a goalkeeper slipped to give away a goal for free, or a tactic that did not work as intended. Quite in contrast, writers seldom use “disasters” to describe an administrative failure or a misappropriate student behavior. Instead, they may complain about the problems behind the incidents as though a “disaster” is not meant to be analyzed but to be absorbed purely emotionally.

It’s strangely exciting to examine disasters in the history of Amherst College. On one hand, I know what it takes to best analyze disasters in the past– a cool head, a pair of analytical eyes, and a logical narrative. Disasters repeat because people can’t take them seriously or don’t analyze them using scientific principles. On the other hand, I am also aware that I’m living through one of the most memorable disasters of Amherst History– the COVID-19 pandemic. The personal experience feels so trivial in a large pool of archived documents. Perhaps it is inherently impossible for one to truly measure the impact of a disaster just by analyzing the “objective” statements and news reports. I’ve created an index to probe the intensity of each disaster in Amherst history, but I understand there is much to do. Only by balancing between the roles of an analyst and a storyteller could one be a true Digital Humanist.

In some years, future archivists would examine our work on the disasters much like me observing the birds. They will draw their own conclusions– whether I measure the impacts accurately, intervene too much, or include everything I should. But just like there will be a Frost after a demolished Walker, there will be new research about disasters that hopefully builds on our questions and discoveries. My thought process will become a part of the archive.

 

Looking Back and Moving Forward

This week’s readings have helped me think more about the importance and implications behind correctly recording metadata. Metadata is not just simply just data about data, it is also a powerful tool that “gives meaning and structure to a collection of items.”1Its effects span beyond just digital humanists and researchers in the library. Well-organized metadata can aid in creating an accessible and inclusive space for its users, in addition to accurately and respectfully describe the history of the community to which it belongs. I will certainly keep this in mind as we continue to work in ACDC and proceed with our project.

In the data visualization workshop, my partner and I choose to look at Amherst’s Report to Secondary Schools from 2013-2022, using the “Snapshot” overview section. We were particularly interested in studying how the demographics of Amherst’s enrolled classes have changed over time. By recording this data and then using Tableau as our data visualization tool, we were able to discover some interesting relationships between some of these categories. I was very interested in studying underrepresented groups at Amherst such as students of color and first generation/low-income students. However, the reports only disclosed the percentage of first-generation students from 2003 to 2011 and 2018 to 2022, and instead reported percentage of low-income students during that gap from 2012 to 2018. The inconsistency in the reporting of data limited the types of analysis we could conduct with this set; but even so, I was still pleased to be able to find some interesting relationships. For example, there has been a noticeable increase over time in percentage of students receiving grants/aid and in percentage of students of color. However, at first glance the same relationship did not exist for percentage of first-generation or low-income students. This makes me wonder if that increase is from an active effort to increase the low-income population or if it is primarily from having a higher proportion of middle-class students who require significantly less aid.  In addition, I also wonder what the reasoning was behind reporting low-income instead of first-generation percentage in those six years? The answers (as well as missing data) will likely come to me if I continue my research. This is definitely something I would like to look into further if I have time.

For visual learners, data visualization is certainly a helpful tool. It helped me see the relationships between different factors more clearly and dig deeper into the meaning behind these data points. I look forward to find a way to incorporate something similar into our final project. With only three weeks left of this fellowship, I am definitely ready to fully immerse myself into our project.

 

1McCulloch, Alissa. “We need to talk about cataloguing: the #NLS9 transcript.” Cataloguing the Universe: A work in progress, WordPress, 11 July, 2019. lissertations.net/post/1177

 

Reflection and Revision

Since reading Trevor Owen’s blog post1in preparation for the first day of this fellowship, I have learned quite a bit more about digital humanities. In particular, the self-guided workshops have been very informative. While these workshops have allowed me to learn and explore about methodologies and techniques in the field, they have been very much focused on the specifics of conducting research and less about the bigger picture of the research process as a whole. A revisit to the blog post I read at the beginning of this fellowship will help me take a step back and think about our research questions as we begin developing our project.

This past week we also had a workshop and different learning types and personalities. As an introspective person, I am constantly reflecting on my choices and actions. I look at where I am in the present, what I’ve done to get there; this helps aid in my decisions on what actions to take in the future to get to a goal I have set for myself. Trevor Owens makes describes a similar process, except with research questions in the DH research process.

In his post, he explored the relationship between research questions and the project itself. Traditionally, we have generally been taught to focus on the results of a project. Many experiments are conducted with the goal of either proving or disproving a hypothesis. However, DH has helped me approach this conventional methodology from a different angle. Research questions are dynamic, constantly changing and evolving to fit what the researcher has found and learned. There is a bigger focus on the process itself, and is less occupied with producing a presentable end result.

In our project brainstorming session, the rest of the cohort and I were drawn to exploring the College during times of crisis. Of course, this a broad topic that holds many possibilities and can be approached in so many different ways. As I was searching through primary source databases, I originally wanted to find information about the College’s response to the 1918 Spanish influenza in order to compare it to the College’s response to COVID-19 over one hundred years later. Though I did not find a lot of information from my initial search, I did learn about many smaller outbreaks that occurred throughout Amherst history. With the college’s two-hundred year long history, I am confident we will find plenty of events that are worth documenting, possibly more than we originally imagined. But because of the short duration of this fellowship, we will likely have to make some difficult decisions about what to include in our final product.

1Owens, Trevor. “Where to Start? On Research Questions in the Digital Humanities.” Trevor Owens: User Centered Digital Memory, WordPress, 22 Aug. 2014. www.trevorowens.org/2014/08/where-to-start-on-research-questions-in-the-digital-humanities/

Pieces of the puzzle

In previous projects, my research process was centered around attempting to find a relationship between two variables, and while the relevant data surrounding those projects may have been direct or indirect measurements of human behavior, there was still an overwhelming desire to find numerical relationships rather than human relationships. The DSSF project differs as it is inherently human-centered and with this characteristic, our cohort has the option of exploring a research question in a variety of ways. But where do we start? — with so many possibilities, narrowing down a topic proves to be a challenge. Currently, I am reflecting on my “research superpower” once more and thinking about how my strengths and the strengths of my colleagues can contribute to a thought-provoking, dynamic project.

Digital humanities researcher, Trevor Owens, illuminated this research dilemma in his blog post, “Where to Start? On Research Questions in The Digital Humanities”. In this post, Owens states that the first step of any DH project is identifying the goals or inspiration for the project. Similarly, I am reflecting on what I would like to get out of this experience. On a personal level, I am hoping to learn more about the digital humanities and the intersections that it has with other disciplines. On a larger level, I am interested in further reinforcing the adage that to make a better future we must learn from the past. I look forward to exploring how students today may relate to the experiences of students in previous classes.

The other day, I really enjoyed meeting with my colleagues for an informal brainstorming session. During this meeting of less than a half-hour, we came up with a primary topic and a backup topic, along with potential methodology. We are all interested in using this current moment ranging from our experiences living during this pandemic to various social and political upheavals to inform our research topic. We are especially interested in how Amherst students, faculty, and administration in the past have dealt with national and global crises. While we are developing the targets of our inquiry, we imagine that our subjects will include natural disasters, conflicts, and socio-political upheavals. This research question could be explored using text analysis to reveal the language surrounding various crises, along with topic modeling to explore if different types of conflicts are associated with different styles of language.

I am excited to take the first steps of our research process and I cannot wait to see the pieces come together!

Owens, Trevor. “Where to Start? On Research Questions in the Digital Humanities.” Trevor Owens: User Centered Digital Memory, WordPress, 22 Aug. 2014. www.trevorowens.org/2014/08/where-to-start-on-research-questions-in-the-digital-humanities/

Stepping Into the World of Research

Within his blog post, Trevor Owens discusses Joe Maxwell’s “interactive approach”[1] to the research process, the importance of focusing on the process itself instead of the more performative aspects of research proposal writing. Like Maxwell, Owens takes a deep dive into the world of reflection and tool-based research and into the implications of theory on research methods. The research question, as Owens describes, is dynamic; it is not merely the end product of the research process but complementary to it. As the research question changes, grows, and develops, it remains in conversation with the formation of new ideas and the growth of their presentation.

Such reflection and thought are crucial to my own research process as I continue to investigate and dive into Amherst’s digital archives. An initial investigation into these resources has helped further an intellectual curiosity towards the digital archives, TimeMapping, and digital exhibits. I have begun to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for this process of reflection that seems to not be a part of many of the research processes of other courses and opportunities. Not merely does it allow me to question and make sense of the material but allows me to really savor reading Amherst Student articles, understanding more about the ideologies and philosophies of former Presidents of the College, and learning about Amherst College’s emergency response through history. Through the Learning Types workshop, I have thought about the importance of metacognition on learning, building a research project, and working in a team. I also have processed through my own ideas on the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection, the finding aid, and discussions on “No one owes their trauma to archivists” by Eira Tansey, utilizing these resources and discussions on them to inform my own research process, something I had never done previously. I have also begun to reflect on the roles of archivists, researchers, and librarians within the research process and the role of the local community in the collection part of the research process. Through this reflection, I am curious to explore further the way that local communities and archivists, researchers, and librarians have interacted throughout history. In thinking about my research question, I am intrigued by the role of the College in public health emergencies. How have students and administrators viewed these emergencies? Have their responses contrasted or conflicted? Who do we not see responding to these public health emergencies and why? What can we attribute this to? I also might want to explore how black Amherst College students responded to events like the Civil Rights Movement or the racial history of the College.

In addition to pondering my research interests and questions, I am beginning to think about the structure of the project. I know I would like to use TimeMapper or topic modeling in some form as I further analyze the ideas, keywords, and events that occur in an article or archival work. I continue to ask crucial questions. How many people/events/time periods do I want to focus on? How do I want to structure the project? How will I present my introduction? How will the visual representation of my work incorporate the more reflective parts of my process? As I continue to formulate a research question, I believe that the structure of the project will become clearer, and I will begin to understand how to build a concrete presentation of my work.

[1] Owens, Trevor. “Where to Start? On Research Questions in the Digital Humanities.” Trevor Owens: User Centered Digital Memory, WordPress, 22 Aug. 2014. www.trevorowens.org/2014/08/where-to-start-on-research-questions-in-the-digital-humanities/

 

Searching for Truth in History

This first week of the digital fellowship has been interesting to say the least. The remote format of the experience has brought a new meaning to the “digital” in Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship. I appreciate learning about an archivist’s job and responsibilities through the workshops, but I also enjoy reading about firsthand experiences in navigating the nuances and complexities of this ever-changing field. A particularly eye-opening piece was the blog post titled “No One Owes Their Trauma to Archivists” by Eira Tansey.1 The comments made in this post really got me thinking about the relationship between archivists and history. Because archives are a center of power and archivists act somewhat as “gatekeepers of history,” they hold an immense amount of power and responsibility in their hands. As the amount of records that exist in this world greatly exceed archivists’ storage capacities, there will inevitably be parts of history that will be turned away, disregarded and eventually forgotten. Archivists have the ability to decide what materials to keep and what to set aside, what is important and what is unimportant.

Given that the profession has been predominantly white and female and continues to remain so, much of what has already been recorded reflects their biases. Recently there have been more attempts to record information from underrepresented populations. In times of chaos or unrest, however, this attempt may backfire. The fact that these communities are disproportionately more likely to be negatively affected by these events and may sustain trauma as a result remains a sad truth. Archivists can actively seek to help amplify their voices, but no one wants to relive trauma. Their well-intended search may in fact be an unwanted intrusion. In the end, individuals have the right to choose what they wish to reveal and what they wish to keep to themselves. How do we balance wanting to capture a more accurate reflection of history with not overstepping our boundaries as archivists? Of course, training in trauma-informed practice and interviewing are a great way to start, but in the end parts of history will still inevitably be left out.

I am grappling with the fact that some parts of history will always be lost, that we will never be able to obtain a complete, objective reflection of our past (if that is even possible to begin with). It is also nearly impossible to separate our biases from the material we are working with or the way that we work with them. The history that we pass down will always hold a tint of our prejudices, conscious or subconscious.

I will keep this delicate relationship in mind as I work towards developing a project with my DSSF cohort. I am excited about all the possibilities that this self-guided research project may bring. The opportunity to explore the college’s history and to be able to dive more deeply into an area of interest are two things I have always wanted to accomplish during my time at Amherst. I look forward to working with the vast primary resource collection and gaining a better understanding of the digital humanities field.

I am glad to have been made aware of some issues that exist in the field early in my fellowship experience. However, awareness is merely the first step in creating change. I hope that throughout the summer, I can maybe find some answers to the questions I have, then apply what I have learned in order to become a better researcher.

1“No one owes their trauma to archivists” Tansey, Eira. “No one Owes Their Trauma to Archivists” http://eiratansey.com/category/archivists/ (accessed 6/23/2020)

Understanding the Process

Through reading, synthesizing and processing, the readings and meetings this week led to an intriguing deep dive into the world of Digital Exhibits. “Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display” by Steven Levine and Ivan Karp brought me into the world of presentation, culture, and permission-giving.[1] The 1984 taking of the taonga or treasures from Maori elders for an exhibit on the Maori people demonstrated the dichotomy of the spiritual significance of these taonga to the Maori people and the historical implications of these taonga as presented in a museum. The article continued to discuss the ways in which museums should incorporate the perspectives and input of local and/or indigenous communities and questioned the methodology behind incorporating a diverse range of perspectives on the material being presented. The article prompted me to think more deeply into the role of museums within the community and the space and framework they take up and how within the world of digital humanities this very dichotomy may exist. How might in the future digital humanities scholars seek to incorporate works and traditions of indigenous communities letting these communities be at the forefront of the collection process? How can we create an environment that upholds the values and the ideologies of various communities and populations without infringing on these communities? To me, these questions are never-ending; they must be incorporated uniquely into each project and each ethnological exhibit, project, and collection.

Amherst College Head of Archives and Special Collections Mike Kelly’s description of the origins of the The Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection deepened my perspective on collecting and storing of works from local communities. A community of those wanting to sell their works, leaders in the indigenous communities, professors, archivists, and librarians helped welcome and respectfully situate the Native American collection into its new home. And so after this discussion, I began to think in more specific ways. How have curators/archivists put these ways of collecting information and where? In what ways do these ways of collecting and synthesizing information and material from local communities translate into my own research process? I begin to answer this last question by thinking about the relationship between the materials, the lives of those captured on the pages of literature collections or yearbooks, and the collector, archivist, or researcher. The archivist or researcher is the one that translates both literally and figuratively the lives of historical peoples and objects through their presentation of the material, calling to an audience of fellow researchers and laypeople to interpret the material. While neither the audience nor the archivists or researchers do not know these actual, lived experiences, they might interpret the thoughts and feelings of those captured in the material. And by a solid and in-depth understanding of these historical materials and its contextualization, the archivist, librarians, or researchers will translate the material with greater clarity and precision, closer to replicating the sentiment of the actual time.

And thus, through understanding this intricate pathway of relationship might we better understand the archivist, researcher, or librarian’s role within the community and start to understand how to include “multiple perspectives or to reveal the tendentiousness of the approach taken” (6).[2] I hope to incorporate these same ideas and the same thought process into my own research process as we move forward.

[1] Karp, Ivan, and Lavine, Steven D. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Smithsonian Institution Press Washington and London, 1991.

[2] Ibid.

A Unity of Contradictions

Digital. Humanities.

–A Unity of Contradictions.

These two words put together are almost oxymoron according to most, if not all, prominent scholars nearly a century ago. To them, digital is the future and humanities are the past. In a world facilitated by quantitative analysis and dictated by data explosion, “digital everything” has become a fashion for scholars of various disciplines. Humanities, on the other hand, never lack criticism on its “outdatedness” to change and exclusivity from the practical tools. There seems to be a prevailing but false notion that asserts institutions should defund “old books” and subsidize data and quantitative sciences. Even liberal arts colleges, whose reputation has been relying on the great books and overall quality of argument, have dedicated themselves to catching up with the wave, diverting more attention to building a digital curriculum and a data-supportive library. 

big data has a large impact on the society
The Big Data Stream

But for others, digital represents change, while humanities symbolize preservation. While the results from digital technologies have fascinated scientists and application users, it also reveals flaws in the generation, interpretation, and communication of numbers to society. The change it brings to the table has also created by-products of overreliance and assertive abuse of data in the naive negligence of its application to human beings and human communities in which humanities have delved in-depth for thousands of years. Humanists are regarded by some as the “defendants” of the study of humans by humans, the resisting force of the data-dictatorship through the analysis of human emotive intuitions and rational responses. And now, researchers from various disciplines, including history, music, literature, data science, computer science, and neuroscience, have proposed for their integrated marriage. Since Roberto Busa created a computer-generated concordance to Thomas Aquinas’ writings in 1946, a new way to research in the humanities has been paved. Growing in the soil of vastly diversified computing applications, digital humanities was molded to shape thanks to data of large scale and scope, as well as technologies to analyze and present them. 

 

A person passing a wall of modern art installations
Installation view at Tate Modern

You see, these are two narratives that different humans can interpret differently. After all, what’s central to humanities as a discipline is the various facets of facts and arguments that altogether construct an explanation or vision for the known and the unknown of human worlds. Narratives matter. So are different ways to advance, condition, and interpret them. When I started to consider the question “What are the digital humanities anyway?”, I think of a narrative constructed by the perceptive scholars and reconstructed with the assistance of technologies. Are they the same or fundamentally different? Are they falsifiable to each other’s arguments? In what ways can we truly call a project a digital humanities one? 

I come to the fellowship in an expectation to go beyond the “easy jobs” and “conventional paradigms”. Digitizing dust-filled archives is a critical first step, but it does not create enough impact to be called a DH project– unfortunately, most projects stop here. Burying potential discoveries in the data pool is as wasteful as leaving ancient records on the dusty shelves. Likewise, making an ideologically-oriented hypothesis on the grounds of humanities without referencing relevant data often fails to convince the public and wastes the many “first-steps” institutions have undertaken to trailblaze in the DH field. I am blessed to have Amherst’s trust in working with college digital archives to see something new and something meaningful. Words and illustrations in the past carry weight. They document the history of the college and the society in alumni’s voices. But our job is to use the data to see them in a different light and then engagingly present our findings. 

If DH is ultimately centered on “the meaningful contributions” it can make to reflect and engage the world beyond the academy, it has a specific purpose to solve the problems or at least find the clues of the multidimensional humanitarian and social issues that have troubled traditional-methodized scholars for their complexity, intersectionality, and obfuscation. But can it ultimately transform the way we epistemologically know things– because only if it does so would it deserve to be entitled as a discipline? 

To me, digital humanities are both overvalued and undervalued. It is overvalued because digital humanities are not transformative in their institutional regard. Analogously, it is not the engine for a jetplane that provides power to change the course of motion. Rather, it is a refined exhaust nozzle of the engine, helping increase the power outlet through either incorporating more air or improving combustion efficiency. It would be unrealistic to say that DH projects completely replace (outwit) analog, linear theories, and approaches because the use of digitization and digital methods still builds on ideological and scholastic presumptions about fundamental theories in particular fields. Nevertheless, neither is its value solely limited to refurbishments and “final ribbons” of already construed humanities projects. DH provides us with not only tools to redefine conventional “humanities research” but also fresh perspectives of how we can deal with the content and evaluate its materiality. It works on both ends, from design to execution, from broad strokes to trivial touches. Its impact is not evaluated based on how much it develops itself, but how much it exhausts itself to serve humanities in general.

And here comes a question I wish to explore further in this fellowship: to what extent are humanities digital? To what extent is data humanistic? Is data only a pathway for a better understanding of humanities, or is it the humanities in its futuristic form? What if our stories, journeys, and communities will be rewritten in datapoints and codes the same way they were written by our ancestors on paper? Would that make or break humanities as a whole? Furthermore, will it help or hinder us to approach the complexity of the big questions in humanities research?

The interaction and alienation of the digital and the humanities represent two contracting forces to pull the discipline in disparate directions. Digital humanists have called for efforts to either normalize or to disrupt the construct. From race to gender, class to culture, we either use substantiated data to legitimize a system for its validity in maintaining social order or, in other cases, uproot a system for its sustenance of societal problems. Furthermore, it seems as though digital humanities is also a tug-of-war (or a handshake) between the subjective and the objective. While humanities research has been attacked for its “manipulative” politically- and ideologically-charged results, will its digitality reinforce or reduce the bias? Is data truly as “objective”, or insulated from political intent, as the general public sees it? Do digital humanities produce signals of social problems or symbols for social change? 

Essentially, however, the transformation from signal to symbol contributes to a renewed understanding of DH. The interaction between humanities and data creates a space for communication of disciplines, approaches, and methods. Space, then, gives birth to a re-creation or reconstruction of the normalized themes or projects that have been complacently cast aside, out of discovery with human eyes. Next comes a critical intervention.

To craft a mission statement for this project as well as DH in general, I would call DH as:

Not only data for humanities, but also humanities for data;

Not only reconstructing paradigms but also redefining the parameter of paradigm usage;

Not only operationalizing methods but also empowering agency in the faculty of volition;

Such that, new tools offer new perspectives to draw novel, disruptive insights. 

And thus, new researches on DH may likewise unite the contradictions.

A blackboard with words about digital humanities
The Author’s Blackboard with Notes on Digital Humanities

Archive Pride and Spreadsheet Prejudice

It is a truth universally acknowledged… that I’m somewhat obsessed with the old course catalogs.

I could extol their data-rich virtues, their college-sanctioned information, the meta-layers of their presentation– but perhaps it’s simpler just to say that they’re awesome.

So it’s little surprise that the project I’m most excited about is a constellation of smaller projects on the changing academic environment of early Amherst, whose backbone is the esteemed collection of course catalogs and which runs tangentially to any inspection of the literary societies.

But I’ve spoken enough and stared at enough and spreadsheet-ed enough the course catalogs. Let’s talk about something else– the Archives.

wb_pandora

There are myriad collections that could contribute to my constellation of projects. I’ve been combing the finding aids, and it’s almost overwhelming how many potential sources fling themselves at me when I open one.

Though I suppose I should be discerning in which documents I call to help contextualize my catalogs, there are so many delicious options that it’s hard to restrain myself. Here’s a taste of them:

In just the Amherst College Early History Manuscripts and Pamphlets Collection, we’ve got discontented students writing to President Moore about their dissatisfaction with the tutor Lucius Field, the faculty criticizing the “Social Union,” a literary society, for its hurtful anonymous compositions, and two score of the senior class trying to skive off the end of the semester by citing the president’s ill health. So we’ve got students expressing dissatisfaction with the administration and the administration expressing dissatisfaction with the students– a lovely example of the tension between the two.

The value of the Clubs and Society Collection, with its minutes and documents from the literary societies hardly need be mentioned here.

The Historical Manuscripts Collection has a wealth of student perspectives on learning. Some examples include an oration on “The Obligations of Genius to Common Minds,” a literary discussion asking “Are Works of Fiction Necessary to Give a Proper Cultivation of the Mind?”, an essay on the “Influence of Science on the Moral Improvement of Society,” an oration on “Motives to Intellectual Exertion,” and another oration on “Science and the Classics – Their Union the True Basis of a Professional Education.” All this, I should note, is just looking at the first twelfth of the collection.

In short, while I’ve been somewhat myopic in my focus on the catalogs, I’m excited now to take a landscape view, to dive back into the Archives and to situate my statistics within a larger story. For so long I’ve been championing my spreadsheets that I’d forgotten how valuable the anecdotal can be– I’m ready to remedy that.

 

Brawl to Ballet (and Embracing the Battle)

Two men, two journals. Or, rather, fifteen men between 1821 and 1861 in Amherst College with an odd assortment of journals, diaries and autobiographies. Or, actually, forty years of Amherst College students living and recording their lives only to have a fraction end up in the archives, tucked away in neat little folders in dark boxes on metal shelves.

rackham mice bird pageBut for me, today, there is only Alfred and Augustus, class of ’58 and ’39, with their patterned leather-bound books enclosing nineteenth century scrawl. And even that is too broad a scope.

Augustus Wing was a philosophical mind, particularly fond of poetry and linguistics, with a keen appreciation of geography and theology and a tendency to jot down bits of history.

Alfred Ellsworth, on the other hand, is a more opaque figure. Not because his journal lacks substance– it was auctioned off with a letter noting its rich Amherst-related contents — but because, quite frankly, I can stare and stare and stare and make little sense of his slender slanting scrawl.

So I spend my time with Augustus.

***

The data is marshaled into precise little rows, the columns standing side by side. Each student from the class of 1825 with their hometown right up against their place and date of death. As if that weren’t already cold and impersonal enough, another sheet strips away the human touch of “Colerain” and “Woodbridge” and replaces them with lengthy strings of latitude and longitude.

But, strangely, it’s not as austere as it seems. As the numbers shift from from 42 to 33, or 77 to 89, you see a life far flung from the familiarity of home. Lincoln Clark and Robert Coffin, next to each in the class list might now be lying next to each other in their graves– both died in the Massachusetts town of Conway. And of the 31 classmates, seven of them– seven!– died in the decade after their freshman year.

The data waits, geographical coordinates ready to map across the United States patterns of concentricity and change. TimeMapper and MapStory lurk between tutorial and troubleshooting tabs, their infrastructure perfect for the task at hand. And yet…

I am thwarted. I add a layer of my data, but nothing appears on screen. Following the diagram in the FAQs, I publish my Google spreadsheet, only to have the website insistently inform me that I should try publishing my sheet. I stare at the other projects and their pristine visualizations and wonder in despair if the rest of the world will ever see the beauty in my data.

***

I am used to living, research-wise, in the best of all possible worlds. With all my texts in neat type, with the library making available any article I require, with Word and Scrivener and Powerpoint all mastered — with all this, I am used to threading together themes with data and established theory with original commentary, everything dressed up and bolstered by with alliteration, chiasmus, and tricolons crescens.

Now I encounter resistance in both the material and the medium, especially at the point of welding them together. For how can I honestly present a picture of student life at Amherst if there’s a rich source I neglected? How much worse will that lacuna be when magnified by the data’s presentation? Is it dishonest, as well, to use anything less than the optimal software to display the data if by doing so its representation loses clarity and possibly significance as well?

This battleground between data and its display is a new one for me, and at times I feel unequipped. Which should dictate which? Whose side am I fighting on? Am I paramedic trying to keep both armies alive, or a Valkyrie ready to whisk away the weaker to a different sort of glory?

I think, perhaps, that as I learn to negotiate that space between it will become less of a brawl and more of a ballet, methodology, data, and research questions each a moving piece but ultimately moving in harmony. That is the ideal, at least.

And as I work towards such a state, I’ll keep dreaming up research questions and digging through the archives. My naive hope at the beginning was to meld medium and material, to have one reflect and amplify the other. I realize now that the task will be more difficult than I imagined– by that only makes me all the more determined to achieve such an arduous but ultimately invaluable union. And to do so I will need an intimate understanding of early Amherst. The hard (yet easy data) of birth and death sites alongside trickier anecdotes and opinions gleaned from diaries, journals, publications, lecture notes and letters. I must be even-handed in my research, push back at the resistance, and aim to achieve a balance.

It is only fair, I think, to have one Alfred for each Augustus.