Author: Keira Koch

This week’s discussion about time really threw me for a loop. While the group was discussing timelines and how they display time, I was having an existential crisis. Time is a very tricky thing, a man made invention. Everyone perceives time differently, so how can you use a digital tool to show the different perceptions time? The western world conceptualizes time as a straight line. I have been reading the book Outlander which is about a WWII combat nurse who travels back in time to 1746. If you make a straight timeline of her life, it wouldn’t make any sense. To complicate this issue of the straight line, imagine what the Doctor’s timeline from Doctor Who would look like. Most of the digital timelines we have looked at are linear. Is there a way to create a time mapping tool that isn’t a line and doesn’t utilize a western perception of time?

In looking for what digital project to write about for this week’s reflection, I stumbled upon a very unique digital project called Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller’s Pandemonium by Cecilia Wichmann. It can be found at http://scalar.usc.edu/works/pandemonium/index.

This project was created as a digital companion to a student’s master’s thesis, “Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller’s Pandemonium”, and was completed in Spring 2015 in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. The student decided to create this Scalar project because she thought “sound art deserves a format suited to listening as well as looking and reading. My aim is to offer an accessible, informal, and flexible experience of my research.” Since this was meant as a companion to a Masters thesis, it is safe to assume that the audience is a scholarly group of people who share the same interest in art and sound. But this project can also be viewed by anyone who stumbles across it.

This project seems to be analyzing the intersection of sound art and documentary to better understand both fields of practice through the organized sound and silence of the composition Pandemonium. Overall, the site functions as a typical Scalar site. The front page is very clean and simple, directing the viewer where to go next. Although the project is written in conversational language, the very nature of the topic is sometimes hard to understand because the topic is very non-traditional.

Even though the topic itself is hard to grasp,, the author does a very good job of explaining it in her numerous About and Information pages. The Welcome page gives the viewer a brief and concise overview of the project. If the viewer would like to learn more, they can read a more in depth description on the Project page. From my browsing of the project I could see that the site was a Scalar site and most of the media was done within the Scalar platform (nothing embedded). The author uses various images, texts, audio, and video in her project. What I though was really nice about her project is that she had an All Media page where you could see every image, text, video, and audio in her project. If you clicked on the link to an image or other form of media, there was decent metadata if you explored further. In conclusion, everything was very well documented.

The author mostly just used Scalar as her main way of displaying her project. I assumed Scalar was chosen because it could move in the traditional way of a thesis paper (by chapter) while also allowing the use of image, audio, and video. On the Project page, the author really explained how she wanted her audience to be able to listen to the sound of Pandemonium. I believe that the audio inserted throughout the project is one of the main things that you wouldn’t be able to learn from a traditional research paper. Although the author does include images and video, you can easily add a flat image into your paper and you could have understood her project well enough without the video. The audio component of this project is what makes this thesis unique and gives the audience a better understanding of the project.

It seems that the rite of passage for college freshmen is to indulge in their unlimited meal plan and gain the freshman fifteen.   But the freshman fifteen is nothing compared to the freshman customs women had to follow in the 1950s. The freshmen customs were a set of rules that freshmen had to follow for a period of time throughout the first semester. These rules consisted of wearing ridiculous hats called dinks, not being allowed to walk on the grass, running errands for upperclassmen, not being allowed to wear makeup, and following many more humiliating rules. Looking at these rules, I wondered, if I were going to college in the 1950s would I have been able to follow them?

Researching these rules allowed me to really imagine what it would be like to be a woman attending college in the 1950s. It gave me a glimpse into the life of a co-ed freshman. The rules are tangible, and if I wanted to I could try to follow them for one month. Although I probably won’t try to replicate these customs, they will be displayed in my digital project. I hope that my audience will be able to picture themselves in these women’s shoes in the same way I have been able to, and appreciate the culture of a different time and how far women have come.

In the beginning of this fellowship, the cohort talked about collaboration as being an important value of digital humanities. As the weeks pass by, I feel that our three DSSF fellows (plus a Mellon) have really learned how to collaborate with one another.  Since Christina and I are both researching Gettysburg College Women’s History, it was natural for us to collaborate with one another. Since week one we were bouncing off ideas and sending information and documents to one another. Christina’s project also lines up very nicely with Lauren’s project about social justice movements throughout Gettysburg College history and they have often talked about similar themes seen in their research. Even though Julia’s topic doesn’t revolve around Gettysburg College history, she doesn’t keep her findings to herself. I can tell you that I have never been more knowledgeable in Civil War military history before. We have also been able to collaborate with our supervisors (through both twitter memes and the digital humanities). I am excited to make progress in my research and continue to collaborate with my supervisors and co-workers as the weeks progress.

This week, the Fellows were asked to research a digital tool. I decided to work with StoryMap JS. StoryMap is a digital mapping tool that allows you pinpoint specific areas on a map you want to describe, add text, and images to. This tool stood out to me because it was very easy to use and I was really able to play around with it. StoryMap also seemed like the most functional digital mapping tool use for my project. It worked the way I wanted it to work for my project and I was able to bring the vision that was in my head to reality. The other mapping tools seemed more complicated than StoryMap and not as useful for my project.

This tool is completely free to use and very accessible to the public. All you need is a Google account, and is this day and age you are bound to create a Google account sooner or later in life. It is a very user friendly tool. There was some directional advice, but I have a very bad habit of not reading directions and decided to get right to it. I am personally not very tech savvy yet and I was able to get the hang of it very quickly.  Although StoryMap was pretty easy to use, I did find myself having a hard time understanding what they meant by some of their setting options. For example, I wasn’t sure exactly what “toner lite”, “gigapixel”, or “map box” meant.

The only part that I know I will definitely need help with is inserting a picture as the map background instead of the standard maps StoryMap gives you. I would like to use old Gettysburg College maps I found in Special Collections as background maps. I was told that I could absolutely make that happen–I would just need to change the maps setting to “Gigapixel”. At first, I thought this would be an easy task to figure out on my own, but I was mistaken. I was very confused when I changed the setting to Gigapixel and was unsure what I was supposed to put in the information boxes.

Still trying to see if I could figure out this task on my own, I decided to enlist the help of the internet. The technical detail tab on the StoryMap website told me how to insert the image by way of coding. Having only completed half of Codecademy, I definitely did not have the knowledge to understand the directions. But, we will be having a mapping workshop in the future where I am sure I will be able to get some help.

Overall I really enjoyed using this digital tool. If you are new to using digital tools and need an easy mapping tool, this definitely could work for you. I am considering using it in my digital project but am unsure if it compatible with Scalar. If I am able to use StoryMap, great! If not, I am open to learning how to use other digital mapping tools!

 

While researching, I find myself visualizing my research and wondering how it will look like in a digital platform. Today, I was researching academics during the 1950s and 1940s. While copying multiple courses and major lists, I tried to stop and think about how I was going to display this information to my audience. It would be boring to just put up a list of majors and courses offered or even a picture of the source. I am sure the reader could have read the book in which I found the information just the same. How can I display this information in an interactive and visually pleasing way? I guess I will have to experiment with new digital tools and use my imagination.

 

I spent some time in Special Collections today looking for information about Esther Fortenbaugh, a graduate of the class of 1946. While scrolling through the yearbook, I failed to see her name among the students. Confused, I enlisted the help of an archivist to point me in the correct direction and see if I made any errors in my research. At first, we were looking for Esther. In our search, we found Ruth Fortenbaugh, who was thought to be Esther’s daughter. But, it made no sense for Ruth to be her daughter because Ruth was a member of the class of 1950, four years after Esther graduated. So we dug deeper, looking at the Fortenbaugh Family finding aid. After about twenty minutes of confusion we finally found out that Esther married into the Fortenabugh family. Esther’s maiden name was Kenyon. I paged through the yearbook again and found Esther under her maiden name. All I have to say is….thank God for finding aids.

Project Name: (Subject to Change) Remembering Women: Women’s Experience at Gettysburg College

Project Owner: Keira Koch

Project Summary

My goal is to create an interactive narrative of women’s stories and experiences at Gettysburg College during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. I plan to use the digital tool Scalar to create an interactive storybook that highlights certain women from each time period. I hope to connect the individual stories of these women to the larger experience of women attending the college. Right now I am looking at the academic and social experiences of women. I am also looking at using a mapping tool of create a map of the college during these time periods to show where women were living and eating during their enrollment at Gettysburg.

Deliverables

• Questions and ideas
• Primary Source: Scrapbooks, Letters, Course Catalogues, Maps, Pictures, the Gettysburgian, and Oral Histories found in the Special Collections
• Secondary Sources: A Salutary Influence by Charles H Glatfelter, To Waken Fond Memory by Anna Jane Moyer
• Word Press
• Gettysburg College Maps (mostly done)

Timeline

• Week 3: Finish up mapping, complete Code academy, start researching the 1950s, and look into possible scan projects
• Week4: Finish up 1950s, start researching 1940s, and continue playing with digital tools
• Week 5: Finish 1940s, start researching 1930s, and continue exploring digital tools
• Week 6: Work with digital maps and start digitizing maps
• Week 7: Start digitizing the 1950s
• Week 8: Start digitizing the 1940s
• Week 9: Start digitizing the 1930s
• Week 10: Finish up loose ends and present project

End of Life/Future Plans

• If possible, I would like to expand on my project when the Fellowship is over. I would like to expand my time frame to encompass all of Women’s history throughout Gettysburg College. If I cannot expand, I hope that my project will be set up in a way that will allow future digital scholars to reference and expand upon.

Last Thursday, I had the lovely opportunity to go on an archaeological dig with Professor Luley and a couple other students enrolled in summer field school. The dig is what I expected it to be–a lot of digging and a lot of dirt, but I had so much fun. The field staff was trying to find evidence of a Revolutionary War Prisoner of War Camp. So far, they had had no luck in finding the remains. But, with each dig there is something new to discover. At the site, I learned that there is a lot of trial and error when it comes to a dig. Every day there is a new piece of land to uncover, and the ground may or may not hold the evidence to what the diggers are looking for. If it does, great! If not, just keep digging. I will take the level of enthusiasm and adventure these people have and apply it to my digital project. I am discovering a world that is new to me. I will learn by my many trials, failures, and successes, and through it all I will keep digging and exploring.

On Friday, the Digital Summer Scholars had the pleasure of visiting other digital scholars at Lafayette College. The visit was both fun and educational. It was interesting to hear about the projects the Lafayette students were working on. One thing that surprised me was the diversity in Lafayette’s digital projects. Since all of our projects heavily revolve around history and Special Collections, I forgot that there are a number of other disciplines that use digital humanities as a way to present research. A couple projects had more of a social science feel to them and unlocked the political science and public policy view of digital humanities. One project revolved around music and creating a synthesizer interactive timeline. The diversity in these projects allowed me to really grasp the concept that digital humanities covers a wide variety of disciplines, not just history. I saw myself involuntarily collaborating and learning from these people I had known for only a couple hours through our discussions, activities, and twitter (this was the first encounter I have ever had with twitter). Overall, I learned things on this trip that I may have not encountered otherwise. I look forward to seeing these students again with their finished projects. I know they will be great!