Category: Week 4

The last couple of weeks have been kind of nuts, with a couple of Digital Humanities/Scholarship conferences more or less back to back (Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference and Keystone Digital Humanities Conference). The Oberlin conference had its first meeting, Keystone DH its second. Both were smaller conferences, something I tend to appreciate more, with some friendly faces to hang out with and eat meals alongside. Oberlin was library-focused, and Keystone had a wide variety of participants, many from outside Pennsylvania. A common theme throughout both, though, was the idea of DH work as something that can be used to bring social justice and equality to the academic world, at least, if we let it.

DH, with its ideas of openness and extensibility, really forces us to look at our values as people who work in higher education and see if we are putting them into practice. Are we publishing our data and methods? Are we making sure our research is available to the widest possible audience? Are we using ethical student labor to assist with developing and implementing projects? Are we being sensitive to cultural meaning given to various artifacts we place on the public web? Are we making our code and technology available to the wider community, and also documenting it in meaningful ways?

We talk a lot about technology at DH conferences, we show a lot of cool projects and discuss research findings. But we also talk a lot about why we do this work in the first place and why we should keep doing it, why we keep fighting for money and time and recognition from the people who hold the account lines, the authority, the privilege and power. We fuss a lot about if we are doing things as well as our peer institutions; there’s almost a competitive attitude to see who is doing the most with the least, while we dream for bigger things and think that every other institution has it better off than ours. We think of the cities on the hill, like Hamilton College and other small liberal arts schools with dedicated DH centers, and think we want to be them.

The reality is, nearly all of us who are doing DH are in similar straits; we have limited institutional support, a small core group of faculty who support the work, people waiting in the wings to learn about DH, and a lot of people on the outside who are looking in with interest and curiosity, but for whatever reason, are unwilling or uninterested to get involved. We’re doing things ad hoc, piecing them together as we best know how, and dreaming about the future, a future where we have this DH thing figured out and have found our own city on the hill.

In many ways, having a dedicated DH center/institute alleviates some of these issues, yet brings even more administrative things to deal with, and with it, a loss of control. What I can appreciate about doing DH in a more non-centralized way is the ability to be nimble and responsive, and be more measured in the types of projects we support and get more deeply involved with students and faculty willing to undertake the work of DH. I get to work with a lot of people cross-departmentally/divisionally, and I also get to meet a lot of interesting people who are doing similar things. Our apprehensions about the future of DH at our institutions draws us together, and we can support each other and let each other know we’re doing it the best way we know how for our students and faculty.

So, yes, I dream for more, but I’m also ok where we are (for now) … and we can keep moving forward.

The project is called Martha Washington: A Life (http://marthawashington.us/), it is about the life and history of Marta Custis Washington, wife of General and Former President George Washington. The project was a collaboration between George Washington’s Mount Vernon, a private non-profit that runs the Mount Vernon Home, and the Center for History and New Media.
The target audiences for this online project are school groups and visitors that go to Mount Vernon or want to know more about Martha Washington. It especially has a focus on school groups because it includes lesson plans for middle and high school teachers; it even has the national history standards for schools.
The questions that this project seeks to answer are: Who was Martha Washington? How did she live and what was her life like in Mount Vernon and how was her life affected by the events and institutions of the time?
The project is pretty easy to navigate; there is a menu that divides the site into four sections: Martha’s biography, teaching materials, archive, and resources. The front page gives a description of the menu sections and has links.
The writing is not only clear, succinct, and precise but it is also easy to read and does not use difficult or advanced terms. The writing was obviously meant for the public, not a hard-core Martha Custis Washington biographer; however it does not come across as condescending to someone’s intelligence.
The link to the about page is at the bottom of the site, it has the staff and information about both of the foundations. There is some technical information about the site included in the information about the staff that worked on the site in what they did to contribute to the site. It says that it is powered by Omeka on the bottom of the site and in one of the staff’s information it said that he “implemented the design and did all of the custom programming for the website on the Omeka web publishing platform.”
Digital assets in the form of artifacts, pictures, and documents obtained by the Mount Vernon foundation were used. Metadata is readily available because it is an Omeka powered website which puts its importance on metadata. Omeka is an online exhibition tool that lets you identify, log, and present artifacts and pictures. In my experience, there’s not much to Omeka besides a display of pictures and artifacts but this project did more than I ever expected from Omeka.
This project is unique in the way that the artifacts coincide with the writing. Like for every section of Martha’s life there are artifacts that coincide with the story, such as the courtship between George and Martha, off to the side it has artifacts one of them being a garnet necklace believed to be from early in the marriage of George and Martha Custis Washington. It brings the artifacts and pictures to life in the context of the story that is being told which is rarely done even in physical exhibits but overall very pleasing to me.

-Julia

I spent the larger part of Thursday and Friday researching in special collections. The more I researched, the more I realized how scant my sources were. As it stands, the information I plan to use in my project largely relies on individual photographs, or small written anecdotes, rather than a comprehensive and fully fleshed history. The noticeable lack of materials made those sources that I could find all the more significant to me, and helped me to realize that we are constantly documenting and shaping our own histories through the memories we immortalize through pictures, words, or sounds.Even if they seem commonplace in the moment, we cannot anticipate the importance they may hold in the future.

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.

For this week’s blog, I chose to review Identities: Understanding Islam in a Cross-Cultural Context which is hosted on an Omeka platform. It can be found at http://marb.kennesaw.edu/identities/.

The project was created by Museums and Community Collaborations Abroad (MCAA).  Its aim was to use a variety of sources to create an exhibit that examined the cultural similarities and differences between the materials (especially oral histories and photographs) in a museum in Morocco and the materials from a museum in Georgia.  MCAA planned to analyze these materials and infer how identities are formed in immigrant communities, both in Morocco and Georgia.

Though not explicitly stated, it seems like the site is meant to appeal to a general audience, and especially highlight and connect with immigrant Muslim communities.  The central question the project asks is how identities are formed in these communities, both in Morocco and Georgia.  The project also centers on the idea of integrating community in general—by featuring community input in the exhibit, the project becomes a community itself.

Identities is an easy project to explore. My favorite aspect is that it’s structured, but still allows the user to take their own path through the website.  The homepage uses a slideshow tool to draw in the user and highlight various parts of the exhibit. Because the slideshow never goes in the same order twice, users can expect to explore a different part of the exhibit each time they visit. The writing on the website is informative and interesting without being dense, especially with regard to the photo captions.

The website features an about page that provides a comprehensive overview of the project and all the museums and organizations that helped to make it. However, there is not information about the specific digital tools they used to make the website. The metadata on the website is comprehensive and follows dublincore formatting.

     Identities’s most compelling feature that distinguishes it from a traditional research paper or exhibit is how easily a user can bring themselves into the website’s narrative. A tab on the home page named “talk back” allows users to either share their story or answer a survey that asks questions about how the user views Islam or what further topics they’d want to see included in the exhibit. Instead of being a passive experience, Identities is active because it fully immerses and incorporates the user.

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.