Julia Wall – Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows 2016

Someone Please Digitize the Library of Alexandria’s Archives

Digital literacy.

I find it funny that a lot of people assume, out of all the majors, history majors are the most digitally illiterate. This was incredibly apparent to me and many others when a presenter at BUDSC16 said that history students were not the most digitally literate. But history students, I believe are extremely competent when it comes to digital tools and critical thinking, especially when it comes to the digital literacy curriculum by Ventimiglia and Pullman.

“1. Find and vet information online. In the digital world, being able to not only find information online but also determine its quality and validity is crucial.”

Vetting historic evidence for bias, authenticity, etc., is one of the first things that you learn as a history student. You also have to identify legitimate historical sources and where they are housed.

“See problems from digital perspectives. Students need to be able to analyze a problem and determine how to use digital tools to solve it. For example, can a problem be solved more quickly by creating a spreadsheet or by working the problem manually?”

We have to see problems from a number of diverse perspectives in history, especially when it comes to historiography and how people in the time period viewed a topic and or problem, could the issue of slavery be solved with 19th century ideology or Napoleonic action?

“3 . Become self-directed learners. The Internet has put all of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. Students should know how to take advantage of that availability of information to become lifelong learners.”

History is the foremost encourager of independent research. There is and always will be more to study, from the 5000000+ biographies about Thomas Jefferson to the one written about Alonzo Cushing, and those who don’t even have biographies. As students of history we are constantly encouraged to go out, to find people, to find stories, to never stop in our pursuit of new knowledge.

“4 . Obtain digital solutions. Technology is constantly changing. Students must learn how to evaluate and buy the right digital tools to solve the problem at hand, rather than just relying on the tools they have used in the past.”

New theories are coming out every single day, new discoveries are being made in history as we speak. With new research comes new theories and interpretations, such as rather than interpreting Robert E. Lee by the “Great Man” or “Lost Cause” ideology, interpret him from a new perspective.

“5 . Learn software quickly. Software is also always changing and improving, so students need to be able to quickly teach themselves new tools. For example, whereas being an expert in spreadsheets was an important quantitative skill set in the past, now it is increasingly important to be an expert in visualization tools such as Tableau.”

This is also taught in history classes, to not stick to one theory, to go out, to adventure, to see history from different perspectives and find new history. It’s one thing to be proficient and know a great deal about Labor history, but times and theories change so it is necessary to also be proficient in new labor history as well. The world of history is constantly changing, historians have to change with it.

“6. Design and create digital solutions. Ultimately students should build a skill set that allows them to develop or customize their own digital tools. This does not necessarily mean that students need to be able to write their own applications from scratch. Rather, they should be comfortable customizing and combining tools to create a complete solution—for example, creating a web-form to automate the collection of customer evaluations and then outputting the results to a spreadsheet for analysis.”

Humanities students, especially history students, already have these tools at their disposal. Not necessarily digital tools, but the tools that I think are harder to learn: Critical thinking.

Digital tools can be easily learned with critical thinking. However critical thinking can be learned without digital tools and that needs to be taken into account.

-Julia

Teaching in the face of adversity

November 9th, 2016 at approximately 2 A.M. I was curled up in my room shocked as I watched state after state turn red. Thoughts raced through my head: what would happen to my undocumented friends who had worked so hard to make it to university, some on full ride scholarship? What would happen to my best friend, who is black and goes to college in Birmingham, Alabama? What would happen to myself and countless other friends of mine who were LGBTQA+? What would happen to another friend of mine who is a Muslim and is the best artist I know, she got a full ride to SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), and is the kindest and most caring person I have ever met.
I then thought what would happen to my future. All that I had worked for over this summer, all the progress that I have made. What would a career in academia be like in a Trump Administration? More specifically I was terrified that, because of all the misogynistic rhetoric that has been spewed by Trump during the campaign, the progress made by women in military history would be ignored and I would be shut out and laughed at. My greatest fear as I have gone forward in military history, is not being taken seriously. But now is not the time for fear, now is the time to push even harder, to go even further. To inspire women, to fight against the greatest accomplishment that they can achieve under a Trump administration is a size zero.
We can no longer ignore differences, we have to acknowledge them, and work accordingly. I am going to have a harder time getting into the military history community than a white male, and a PoC is going to have a harder time than I am. We must take that into account. Even though I’ve talked about myself a lot in this, this is not just about me, it’s about the people I’ve mentioned in the first paragraph.
I’ve stated in blog posts, in conversation, at conferences, that the field of digital humanities is open and full of possibilities and opportunities that would not be allowed outside of it.
Instead of cowering in fear and resigning ourselves to saying “this is reality there is nothing I can do”, we need to accept what has happened and teach in light of that. We need to teach that in the face of adversity we need to fight for diversity in thought, in character, and in academia as a whole.

Digital Tool Review: FabulaMaps

Digital Tool Review #1: FabulaMaps

What are the key features of this digital tool? How is this digital tool distinct from other ones similar to it?

FabulaMaps is an interactive mapping tool with a narrative element. It’s different because it has many more mapping features than something like StoryMapJS but has the narrative element that is lacking in Google TourBuilder, ZeeMaps, etc. It also differentiates from tools like Neatline, CartoDB, and ArcGIS in that it is user friendly and can be learned with minimal frustration. It also has many more interactive features that differentiate it from any mapping tool that I have had experience with, like animated markers and polygons.

What kinds of research questions might this digital tool help you answer?

It can tell an interactive story over time with its narrative features, document a growth or event, or map locations with giving background. This is especially helpful for historic projects because of its narrative elements you can map changes over time.

What kind of documentation is available for this tool?

The site has an about page and a blog in which popular questions and features are explained and the elements of FabulaMaps are discussed.

Is the digital tool free, or is there a cost to use it?

For students it’s free, there are versions that are paid but FabulaMaps is perfectly functional at a basic level without the extra features.

What kinds of data/input does the tool require?

The tool requires points on the map and information in the slides. It is possible to ditch the narrative element altogether by skipping the slides and simply having an interactive map. It can hold multitudes of text, media, and animations.

Are there any privacy concerns?

None that I know of. Once you start the map it is public facing, but only the creator of the map can edit it.

How difficult will this tool be to master? Does it require an outside expert or special technical skills, or can it be learned with practice?

This tool is incredibly user friendly, it has labels on the different icons and explanation tabs of what they do. It does require a bit of experimenting with the tool to fully understand it, but that is with any tool. If there are problems or questions FabulaMaps has many official tutorials on its site and many outside tutorials online.

Could you use this digital tool for your project? Why or why not?

I am trying to use this in my project because it has both the narrative element I need and the mapping features that I believe my project could benefit from. I have a StoryMapJS right now but FabulaMaps would allow me to follow every cadet individually which is incredibly important to me. With the many colors and options of markers it gives me the ability to differentiate between cadets and battles. Also FabulaMaps has an amazing feature that allows markers to travel along lines that could show how far the individual cadet travelled and how many of the cadets travelled together. The problem is that I have so much data and information and FabulaMaps has so many possibilities that I am unsure how exactly to format the narrative element.

Apparently Undergrad Research is Pretty Nifty

Okay so Bucknell.

I enjoyed people being interested in my project and laughing at my jokes. Above all I have to say I did enjoy the Twitter attention, being quoted and retweeted made me feel like my voice was being heard and my words were taken to heart.

What we had with DSSF was incredibly unique and independent. All the undergraduate research that was presented at BUDSC16 was either in relation to a professor’s work or highly regulated with papers and essays that accompanied their project. We had the opportunity and privilege to conduct truly independent research that was guided by workshops to give us the tools to work with. The opportunity that DSSF gave us was absolutely priceless.

“Tell me all about your project. I want to know all about the Civil War.” One man said while Lauren snorted in the background because she knew what was coming. This man was a speaker that teaches at UMass at Amherst in the Latin American Literature Department. I happen to know another professor that studies Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst, Ilan Stavans who was a mentor to me at the Great Books Summer Program hosted through Amherst College. He had a daughter interested in the Civil War as well and we talked at length about both interest in the Civil War, my time with Dr. Stavans, and my project.

Since my cadets came from everywhere I made connections with a lot of libraries that have something or another on at least one of them. For example: the librarians from Rochester didn’t know that O’Rorke bridge, a prominent bridge in Rochester I’m guessing, was named after my cadet Patrick O’Rorke and that they had papers in their collections from Patrick O’Rorke and from his wife as well and invited me to visit some time. This happened many times over.

The Digital Humanities community is way more open and casual than I expected. I stated in my presentation that in Digital Humanities that I could be judged by my work and not by who I was, even though I got a tweet that disagreed with me I largely found that anyone could do research on anything. However, digital humanities need funds. Yale put together a huge project based on crowd-sourcing and student’s stories that they collected in a view months and Lauren and I were in awe in how they could pull something together that fast and have it be so organized and nice. We quickly were reminded that it was Yale and they had money for DH. Yale quality DH requires funds, time, and tons of manpower. But with that said, DH is still a community of practice. At panels Q&A there were many suggestions of new tools or platforms to use, constructive criticisms and comments that were taken into account. Because new tools are always evolving creating new possibilities for everyone no matter how experienced or inexperienced someone is.

Bucknell was an incredible, yet exhausting, experience that I believe was helpful for all of us and gave us insight to the DH community outside of our little library space.

-Julia

West Point Best Point

Are you ready for this?

At approximately 0800 hours I left the Culinary Institute of America with my significant other who was so incredibly good to drive me to West Point.

Approx. 0900 hours we got to West Point and we both had to go through background checks and get IDs, even though said significant other was only driving me to the Library (which I later found is no easy feat). But my ID said “Volunteer” whereas his only said “Visitor” so I was extremely proud. If anything tells you how petty I am when it comes to West Point, there it is.

I went to the Library which is absolutely gorgeous, even the statue of Jefferson looked beautiful. It was everything that I had seen in the pictures and everything I dreamed it would be. I had to wait around 10-15 minutes for someone from Special Collections to fetch me and take me up to the holiest of holy places for an American Military Historian.

I was started out with Staff Records but quickly realized that I wouldn’t go very far if I did not know who exactly was in my class. So I asked to see the Casualties of Cadets, which is a record of the cadets who resigned, died, or were dismissed from West Point. This was important for me because I got to see who exactly pulled out to join the Confederacy.

Beside name, they had class number. In the year 1860, my class were considered number 2, which was easily identifiable in the records. Looking at the Casualties of Cadets was actually quite humorous because you get to a point around December 1860 where cadets stop being dismissed and start resigning to join the Confederacy. It was here where I found the most deciding factor in making this project my Senior Capstone.

I found twenty more cadets in my class.

20 unaccounted men with no information other than their name and maybe their state. These twenty don’t have nice put together records like Cullum’s Register.

My map on my site is out of date and uneditable because it’s StoryMapJS and you cannot insert slides which frustrates me beyond belief. Which is also a part of the reason why I am working on a FabulaMap for my site.

But let me put twenty more cadets into perspective.

I started the summer with 34, well-documented, well-known, graduates. Which means I had a cohesive record of where each graduate went during the war and after if they lived, through Cullum’s Register. The Class of 1861: Custer, Ames, and Their Classmates After West Point gave me John Kelly, Felix Robertson, and Pierce Manning Butler Young. And I speculated that James Dearing was also in the class. All four are extremely well-documented officers, most who became generals. So I had 38 men to research, I only fully got through one in the summer.

So.

Five more cadets would have meant that I probably would have worked on this for another couple years.

Ten more cadets would have meant that I have enough to do post-grad research.

Twenty more cadets means that this will be my life’s work and I will live and die still doing research on them.

However, I was too excited at the time I found this out that I wasn’t thinking about the consequence of having 20 more. I was literally so excited to get to the Book of Demerits that I hit my head on the table trying to plug in my laptop.

Most cadets had two pages, Custer of course had four. Looking through the reasons for the demerits was extremely rewarding. When looking at these men through an objective lens, they can often seem like cold and distant figures defined by heroic deeds like Alonzo Cushing. But then you look through his demerits and find that he got one for laughing during reveille, it makes them seem closer, more like people that once were rather than statutes on a pedestal.

I sadly had to cut my time in the archives short since West Point is like the Hotel California. Because if you don’t have a car YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE. Also because I didn’t have a car I had to walk the two miles from the Library to the Visitor’s Center and was again reminded why I did not join the military. But all the taxi services were full, the bus from New York City to West Point is one way, and Uber wouldn’t go that far. So I spent a good hour or so freaking out until one extremely generous and gracious tour guide, out of the goodness of her heart told me that she could drive me to the nearest train station. Her name is Gerry and I’m still in contact with her and I plan on taking her out to a very nice lunch when I go back for future research.

So besides my little scare of not being able to get home after five days, I would say my trip to West Point was pretty eventful and I’m definitely going back, but only when I have the extended amount of time to fully appreciate and submerge myself in research.

-Julia

Fiddling with Fabula

Well it’s certainly good to be back at that Digital Humanities game, even though I don’t really know what to do with all these people in library. Not even two weeks in and I got my first mission: to find a digital mapping tool that’s easier than CartoDB for a Spanish 306 class. Finding a mapping tool that’s more user friendly than CartoDB is an easy feat, but deciding which tool to use is difficult. I already had a list of mapping tools that I had experience with StoryMapJS, Google TourBuilder, ZeeMaps, and a couple of other minor ones that I had looked into while trying to put together my own map over the summer. ZeeMaps and TourBuilder are extremely user friendly but lack the narrative and sophistication of StoryMapJS, and StoryMapJS lacks a lot of mapping features that ZeeMaps and TourBuilder have. Taking this knowledge, I decided to feature out to Digital Humanities Forums and sources to find new mapping tools that would hopefully give me what I was looking for.

At first I tried to work with Neatline, a mapping plugin for Omeka. It’s a very intensive mapping tool with an emphasis on the cartography side rather than a narrative, like CartoDB but slightly more user friendly. If I have time I would like to do more with NeatLine, but it takes lots of time and a lot more patience. And then I found it. The love of my life, my pride and joy: Fabula Maps.

Fabula Maps has the narrative and sophistication of StoryMapJS but with more mapping features like animated markers, base maps, and the option of multiple pathways. Even better, it’s extremely user friendly. Even better, it’s embeddable. And the best is that the markers are animated!! So I was super excited to show this to the professor and she seemed very interested by it, so my job right now is to test the limits of Fabula Maps, like how many markers and how much media I can put in before it crashes, if it crashes. I think that Fabula Maps is a great in class digital tool because it has great user experience and very distracting features which can easily capture student attention.

Along with testing Fabula Maps for Spanish 306, I’m seeing if Fabula Maps would be more suited to my needs than StoryMapJS in terms of mapping out my cadets. While it’s not exactly continuing my research I think it’s important to improve upon what I already have, especially if there is a medium that is more suited to my project.

Speaking of the continuation of my project, the service records have been set back a bit seeing as there was a problem with transferring my files onto my new laptop, so I don’t have any of my research files or records from War of the Rebellion, except for the indexes that I have written in my notebook. It’s a loss of research but with my indexes, I don’t have to start from scratch. I hope to have my records done by Bucknell, which I am super excited for by the way. I think the entire cohort is excited. Then we can reunite with our Lafayette counterparts, admittedly not all of them, but enough to balance out the Digtal Scholar Schuyler Sisters.

-Julia

Boldly Go

In my first blog post, my definition of Digital Humanities was “TBA”. To be completely honest, I did not fully understand or comprehend the weight that Digital Humanities would have on my life and how much of an integral part it would have in my future academic studies.

To redefine Digital Humanities now, I would like to start out with a definition of Humanities from Standford.

“The humanities can be described as the study of how people process and document the human experience.”

Digital Humanities is a new birth of Humanities, trying to be freed from the formal “academics only” stigma of traditional Humanities. What comes to my mind when I think of a comparison of Digital Humanities is Star Trek. It is a new field, there is so much to explore and create but we aren’t doing it to conquer, but to explore and add to the wealth of knowledge that is already out there. We are not creating a new world, we are just adding to parts of the old one. The core of Digital Humanities is still the same; to explore what makes us human and what connects us to each other. But the way that we are approaching it is different and our values are different as well.

To compare to Star Trek once again, the difference of traditional Humanities and Digital Humanities are like the differing goals of exploration for the Age of Exploration in the 16th century and Star Trek Exploration in the 23rd century. Like the goals of Exploration in the 16th century were things like: spread of religion, to attain wealth and exotic riches, and to spread imperial power. These are also true of what you can say of traditional Humanities because they have been around since the Age of Exploration and even before that. The goals of 23rd century exploration are: “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before”. Exploration while embracing the diversity that has been brought to the forefront of Humanities.

“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms.”
-Gene Roddenberry

I believe we have reached that point to where we not only praise diversity but when diversity is lacking we call it out and address it, especially in the field of Digital Humanities. One of the core values of Digital Humanities is diversity, not only in subject matter, but in people. Part of diversity is accessibility. Traditional humanities has the stigma of old white men because for centuries only old white men formally studied humanities, it was only accessible to them. One of the values of Digital Humanities that I find very important and very inspiring about Digital Humanities is the importance placed on accessibility and how anyone can access and anyone can do Digital Humanities.

Through this fellowship I have learned that Digital Humanities is not “TBA”, it is a defined field of diversity and exploration into what connects us as humans and how we can make that accessible to everyone, not just Humanists or Digital Humanists.

Kirk out.

Oooooooooooooo boi

If you think Digital Humanities is exclusive lemme tell you about being a woman in Military History and more narrowly, a woman pursuing Military Theory. There are very few women military writers, most of them write about having spouses in the military, the home-front, or affairs with generals. Let’s narrow down the field a bit more to women that write about military history, and even then we don’t talk about hard military tactics (unless you’re Jennifer Murray, I love you and your work and you inspire me every day). Now let’s narrow it EVEN FARTHER into women that study military theory. Me. Now let me say that again for y’all in the back: THERE ARE NO PROMINENT WOMEN MILITARY THEORISTS. You have people like Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Jomini.

What I am doing, while not “hard” military theory like artillery and weapon movements and troop formations, it shows the social side of war. Because we often forget that war, as Clausewitz so famously puts it “War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale”. It is organized murder for a cause of a government or non-governmental organization. This affects the human psyche in so many ways as expanded upon in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman (which has honestly changed my life and my outlook of warfare).

These young men, barely out of their teenage years were thrust into a war against their own countrymen to fight for the future of a nation, North or South.

This project is different, it is revolutionary in the sense that it deals with an aspect of war that is not discussed often. It is revolutionary in the way that it is a resource on military history that is interactive and open to the public free of charge and free of any elitist military vocabulary. It is revolutionary in the way that it is done by a 19 year-old female civilian.

The field of military history is changing with West Point leading the charge by digitizing their textbook, which is basically just a huge digital project now. It gives the experience that users did not have before such as 3-D models of guns, ships, and other weaponry, interactive battle maps, etc. While my project does not have all those fancy thingamajigs, it does have interactive elements to be more hands-on with the knowledge. It has visualizations to better display the information. I have videos and wikipedia pages and links to other pages of information on every battle so that even those who do not know what happened at the battle of Gettysburg can learn more not only about the battle, but about the men who fought in it.

I want people who would not usually be interested in the Civil War or in military history to look at this project and not only understand what happened to the cadets, but to feel for them. And also to show that anyone can do military history.

-Julia

Insert John Bachelder Reference here

Elevator speeches are a problem for me, because when I get passionate I just start talking really fast and can go on and on until someone finally tells me to shut up. This makes elevator speeches problematic since they need to get the point across in around a minute. To fit all of my research and all of this program into a minute or less is an art form that I have not quite perfected yet, but well on my way to working on it.

I suppose it would start with a greeting like “Hi, my name is Julia Wall.” And maybe if the person I was talking to did not know me “I am a sophomore at Gettysburg College.” And maybe, if I had time, I would say my major and minor. But I think that’s getting a bit ahead of myself.

“Hi my name is Julia Wall, I am a history major, Civil War Era Studies minor at Gettysburg college. This summer I have been working in my college’s library on a digital humanities project, basically a more interactive digital form of humanities. My project is about the West Point Class of June 1861 and their involvement in the Civil War. I am basing my research off of a yearbook of one of the cadets in Special Collections and researching what happened to each cadet based on West Point cadet registers, the War of Rebellion Records, and the cadet’s annotations in the yearbook. I have an interactive timeline for each cadet and an interactive map that shows where each cadet went during the course of the Civil War. My project is all about the relationships that all these cadets formed at West Point, I am visualizing their journey and their lives.

Well since I am very proud of my project I would want to and am going to share it with everyone. Basically for months after this project and when everyone asks me about how my summer was and how I spent my summer I will go into my elevator speech and try to convey the importance of my project and of Digital Humanities/Scholarship. I have already practiced my elevator speech many times over, not just in the library or to school faculty, but just to people in town. I love these cadets and I am so passionate about this project that I don’t think I could shut up about it.

An audience that would probably be interested in my project and research would be the Civil War community. People that I would talk to from the Civil War community would probably have more interest and more questions about my research and findings so I would probably get more time to talk about what I have done. I would also probably personalize it and relate it to John Bachelder’s history of the battle of Gettysburg. Because it was basically just a compilation of reports right now, my next step in the project is to personalize it and make conclusions, but for now it is what it is and I will try to keep it at 2 minutes or less.

-Julia

Billy Mays of Data Sets

When looking at possible data sets for my research I could almost laugh. My research project is incredibly data-heavy and keeps being added to. I could do a data set about how class rank affected military rank in the class, or how far each cadet traveled, there are so many possibilities it is absolutely insane.

I actually have a data set that I am including in my project and it is the battles of the civil war that the cadets were in and how many cadets were in each battle/expedition/arsenal/etc. I believe that this data set can be best displayed through a map which I am working on through StoryMapJS.

I have already made many spreadsheets of this and also a couple of test maps, they have been updated continuously because there is always research and battles that I somehow missed the previous time. I went from 75 locations to 153 in the span of a couple of weeks, and even them some minor skirmishes and battles might be missing.

I like the layout and display of StoryMapJS and how you can add media to locations. There is one great problem however, you can only add slides in order. So say I missed a location on the previous data set, I can’t just go in and add in a location between slides, which is a problem when I have over 150 locations.

And if we really want to talk about data sets, my project is basically a giant mass of data sets. For every cadet I am doing a timeline. My timelines take the data of where each cadet went during the Civil War and what happened to him, including arsenals they stayed at, battles they fought, expeditions they went on, and other events in their lives such as marriages and death. I will also include what other cadets were in shared engagements, adding more data to an already dataful data set. I am doing this for all 38 cadets.

Not only am I doing a map and individual timelines, I am also compiling records from The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. I am not compiling all the records, but good lord it certainly feels like it. I am going through all 83 copies of The War of the Rebellion and finding the records about all my cadets. Every report, order of battle, casualty list, even every mention of each cadet will eventually be put on the page as well. The data set with this has to do with the books themselves and how many mentions each cadet has in companion to the timeline data set of where each cadet has been.

Now, I have a great deal of data. I could not possibly need or want any more, right?

WRONG.

I could do so much more!

Not only could I do this for the class of June 1861, I could compile one for the May class as well.

I could do this for every West Point class that had cadets that served in the Civil War! It would be around 30 classes, with hundreds upon hundreds of cadets. So I should be lucky that I am starting so small, but it could be worse.

-Julia