DHWI will provide an opportunity for scholars to learn new skills relevant to different kinds of digital scholarship while mingling with like-minded colleagues in coursework, social events, and lectures during an intensive, week-long event located amid the many attractions of the Washington, D.C. region.

Courses are open to all skill levels and will cater to many different interests. For the 2013 Institute we’ve assembled an amazing group of instructors who will teach everything from introductory courses on project development and programming, to intermediate level courses on image analysis, teaching with multimedia, and data curation. DHWI will also feature more technically-advanced courses on text analysis and linked open data. We hope that the curricula we’ve assembled will appeal to graduate students, faculty, librarians, and museum professionals as well as participants from government and non-governmental organizations.

An exciting program of extracurricular events will accompany the formal DHWI courses to capitalize on the Institute’s proximity to the many cultural heritage organizations in the region. This stream of activities, which we’re calling “DHWI Public Digital Humanities,” will include an API workshop, a hack-a-thon, and opportunities to contribute videos and other materials to the 4Humanities campaign to document the importance of the humanities for contemporary society.

Both the outward-looking DHWI Public Digital Humanities program and the week of high-caliber, in-depth digital humanities coursework will be kicked off by the Institute Lecture. This year’s speaker will be Seb Chan, currently the Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City.

We hope that many of you will join us this winter in Maryland for what promises to be a terrific event. Registration is now available at this site.

Like DHSI, we will be offering a limited number of sponsored student scholarships to help cover the cost of attending the Institute. The scholarships are made possible through the generosity of this year’s DHWI Instructors and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

To keep up with news and events related to DHWI, follow @dhwi_mith. For all other enquiries, please contact Jennifer Guiliano, dhinstitute@umd.edu

To briefly fill-in anyone just joining the conversation, the FLA is a project that seeks to understand the significance of literature written by foreign authors in the United States. (For a more extensive description, you can check out the project information page here.) The Modern British archive is a sub-project focused on the reception of modern British authors. Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland and eventually became a British citizen, is our first focus-writer. We began our work this past fall by organizing an enormous amount of print archival materials on the reception of Conrad that has been gathered by Peter Mallios and his students over the past several years. These materials covered the length of Conrad’s career and beyond, from contemporary reviews of Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), to personal reminiscences of individuals who met Conrad during his only trip to the U.S. in 1923 to reflections on the impact of his works written well after his death in 1924.

Our original efforts were put into scanning as much of this material into an OCR-able format. However, after learning more about sentiment analysis and what it can potentially do, and also after reevaluating our initial resources, some of which consisted of copies that we found would not produce OCR-able scans, we decided to adopt a new strategy. We both narrowed our data set in terms of years and headed back to the library to gather more materials. We decided to focus on the latter half of Conrad’s career, beginning with the publication of Chance, which first appeared in serial form in 1912. It was published as a book in 1913 and became his greatest commercial success to-date and marked an important milestone in Conrad’s transition from the relative obscurity of his early career to the widespread popularity he enjoyed later. Our data set will extend to 1926 to include reviews of and references to the last published original collection of Conrad’s short stories, Tales of Hearsay (1926). We are particularly interested in understanding Conrad’s shift from a lesser known to a popular writer in the United States. We are further interested in how the specific group of women readers contributes to this shift. Our work will build on that of Susan Jones, whose groundbreaking Conrad and Women (1999) explores Conrad’s relationship to women, both in terms of women within his personal life and women as a set of readers that Conrad’s works engage and respond to. In contrast, our research will focus on women readers as reviewers, as writers who actively create an idea of Conrad within the public sphere.

In compiling our new data set, we have drawn on our own previously mentioned collection, tracking down alternative copies of any materials that cannot create scans readable by our OCR software. We’ve also used Theodore George Ehrsam’s A Bibliography of Joseph Conrad (1969) as a resource for identifying materials not already in our collection. We now have an extensive list of six hundred and fourteen articles to track down, which continues to grow. We’ve located many of these articles at the Library of Congress and the University of Maryland’s own libraries. Numerous original journals from the early twentieth-century are stored in off-campus shelving at UMD, and the staff at McKeldin Library has been a wonderful help in obtaining these materials. We’ve begun the scanning process, and, as of this week, we have roughly one hundred and sixty-six files scanned, comprising just over eighty articles, although some of the earliest scans produced from our initial materials may not be OCR-able. We have not yet finalized our sentiment analysis questions, but we anticipate that many of them will be similar to those used for the Russian Author Initiative. (While we belong to the same fleet, we’ve got a somewhat smaller crew, and we’re not quite as far along.)

Obviously, we still have an enormous amount of work to do. However, while standing at the scanner, it’s hard not to think forward to what this archive might some day look like, and what it might potentially do. Two issues in particular have occurred to me that we may need to delve into as we proceed. 1.) With both the Modern British archive and the Russian Author Initiative, we’ve considered the issue of how much supplementary material to provide users. On the one hand, such material would serve to allow users to understand what they read in context. On the other hand, scanning supplementary materials takes up resources, both in terms of time and storage space. One comprise we might consider would be to include within the site descriptions of the journals and newspapers our materials come from, including political affiliations. 2.) A fair amount of the reviews we have found are either unsigned or merely initialed. If we are serious about tracing the role of women reviewers in Conrad’s reception, we are going to have to come up with a method for tracking down these names. (Any suggestions readers of this blog may have as to how we can go about this, beyond Google, would be greatly appreciated!) Identifying these reviewers will be an additional step in our process, but could dramatically affect our results.

Jennifer Wellman will receive her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland in May 2012. She is an Executive Editor of the FLA Project.

Without answering that question, I’d like instead to present an instance of when using images (visualizations of data) to “see” language led to an improved understanding of the kinds of questions we might ask and the types of answers we might want to look for that wouldn’t have been possible had we not seen them differently—through graphical array.

Currently, I’m using a tool called MALLET to create a model of the possible “topics” found in a set of 276 ekphrastic poems. There are already several excellent explanations of what topic modeling is and how it works (many thanks to Matt Jockers, Ted Underwood, and Scott Weingart who posted these explanations with humanists in mind), so I’m not going to spend time explaining what the tool does here; however, I will say that working with a set of 276 poems is atypical. Topic modeling was designed to work on millions of words, and 276 poems doesn’t even come close; however, part of the project has been to determine a threshold at which we can get meaningful results from a small dataset. So, this particular experiment is playing with the lower thresholds of the tool’s usefulness.

When you run a topic model (train-topics) in MALLET, you tell the program how many topics to create, and when the model runs, it can output a variety of results. As part of the tinkering process, I’ve been working with the number of topics to have MALLET use in order to generate the model, and was just about to despair that the real tests I wanted to run wouldn’t be possible at 276 poems. Perhaps it was just too few poems to find recognizable patterns. For each topic assignment, MALLET assigns an ID number to the topic and “topic keys” as keywords for that topic. Usually, when the topic model is working, the results are “readable” because they represent similar language. MALLET would not call a topic “Sea,” for example, but might instead provide the following keywords:

blue, water, waves, sea, surface, turn, green, ship, sail, sailor, drown

The researcher would look at those terms and think, “Oh, clearly that’s a nautical/sea/sailing” topic, and dub it as such. My results, however, on 15 topics over 276 poems were not readable in the same way. For example, topic 3 included the following topic keys:

3 0.04026 with self portrait him god how made shape give thing centuries image more world dread he lands down back protest shaped dream upon will rulers lords slave gazes hoe future

I don’t blame you if you don’t see the pattern there. I didn’t. Except, well, knowing some of the poems in the set pretty well, I know that it put together “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by W.C. Williams with “The Poem of Jacobus Sadoletus on the Statue of Laocoon” with “The New Colossus” with “The Man with the Hoe Written after Seeing the Painting by Millet.” I could see that we had lots of kinds of gods represented, farming, and statues, but that’s only because I knew the poems. Without topic modeling, I might put this category together as a “masters” grouping, but it’s not likely. Rather than look for connections, I was focused on the fact that the topic keys didn’t make a strong case for their being placed together, and other categories seemed similarly opaque. However, just to be sure that I could, in fact, visualize results of future tests, I went ahead and imported the topic associations by file. In other words, MALLET can also produce a file that lists each topic (0-14 in this case) with each file name in the dataset and a percentage. The percentage represents the degree to which the topic is represented inside each file. I imported the MALLET output of topics and files associated with them into Google Fusion Tables and created a dynamic bar graph that collects file-ids along the vertical axis and along the horizontal axis can be found the degree that the given topic (in this case topic 3) is present in the file. As I clicked through each topic’s graph, I figured I was seeing results that demonstrated MALLET’s confusion, since the dataset was so small. But then I saw this:

[Below should be a Google Visualization. You may need to “refresh” your browser page to see it. If you still cannot see it, a static version of
the file is visible here.]

If the graph’s visualization is working, when you pass your mouse over the lines in the bar graph, the ones that are higher than 0.4, then the file-id number (a random number assigned during the course of preparing the data) appears. Each of these files begin with the same prefix: GS. In my dataset, that means that the files with the highest representation of topic 3 in them can all be found in John Hollander’s collection The Gazer’s Spirit. This anthology is considered to be one of the most authoritative and diverse—beginning with classical ekphrasis all the way up to and including poems from the 1980s and 1990s. I had expected, given the disparity in time periods, that the poems from this collection would be the most difficult to group together because the diction of the poems changes dramatically from the beginning of the volume to the end. In other words, I would have expected the poems to blend with the other ekphrastic poems throughout the dataset more in terms of their similar diction than by anything else. MALLET has no way of knowing that these files are included in the same anthology. All of the bibliographical information about the poems has been stripped from the text being tested. There has to be something else. What something else might be requires another layer of interpretation. I will need to return to the topic model to see if a similar pattern is present when I use other numbers of topics—or if I include some non-ekphrastic poems to the set being tested—but seeing the affinity in language between the poems included in The Gazer’s Spirit in contrast to other ekphrastic poems proved useful. Now, I’m not inclined to throw the whole test away, but instead to perform more tests to see if this pattern emerges again in other circumstances. I’m not at square one. I’m at a square 2 that I didn’t expect.

The visualization in the end didn’t produce “new knowledge.” It isn’t hard to imagine that an editor would choose poems that construct a particular argument about what “best” represents a particular genre of poetry; however, if these poems did truly represent the diversity of ekphrastic verse, wouldn’t we see other poems also highly associated with a “Gazer’s Spirit topic”? What makes these poems stand out so clearly from others of their kind? Might their similarity mark a reason for why critics of the 90s and 2000s define the tropes, canons, and traditions of ekphrasis in a particular vein? I’m now returning to the test and to the texts to see what answers might exist there that I and others have missed as close readers. Could we, for instance, run an analysis that determines how closely other kinds of ekphrasis are associated with Gazer’s Spirit’s definition of ekphrasis? Is it possible that poetry by male poets is more frequently associated with that strain of ekphrastic discourse than poetry by female poets?

This particular visualization doesn’t make an “argument” in the way humanists are accustomed to making them. It doesn’t necessarily produce anything wholly “new” that couldn’t have been discovered some other way; however, it did help this researcher get past a particular kind of blindness and helped me to see alternatives—to consider what has been missed along the way—and there is, and will be, something new in that.

Lisa Rhody is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Maryland, a Spring 2012 MITH Winnemore Dissertation Fellow, and a lecturer on the arts for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. This post first appeared on Lisa’s personal blog on April 30th, 2012.

But I’ve also been reflecting on the connections—and the gaps—between thought, (research, intellectual endeavor) and the tangible (the physical, the authentic object). Archivists have long been preoccupied with the authenticity of the original object, the power of evidence, of historical aura. And in so many ways, archivists have been attempting to connect their tangible collections with the thinking that preoccupies researchers and scholars. Archives, then, are also spaces in which thought becomes tangible (Porter’s letters are the tangible incarnation of her thought) and the tangible becomes thought (scholars interface with her letters and transform the physical paper into their own intellectual discoveries).

Archive as wireframe? The reading room offers an architecture in which intellectual innovation can take place. Behind the scenes, the stacks are skeletal, their shelves like the ribcage that houses and defends the heart. What happens, though, when archival collections move online? What role does authenticity play in the digital realm, and how can curators use technology to preserve and even enhance the magic of the original? If a digital edition facilitates access to otherwise untouchable material, in some way, it actually enhances tangibility. In thinking about the lives of archives in digital editions and in approaching these wireframes, I have also been thinking about stewardship, about the intermingled identities of the figures who interact with and shepherd a collection—the scholar, the editor, the digital humanist, the curator.

The wireframes I have created (please pardon the rough work of a first-time wireframer) attempt to invite interaction with the letters from the perspectives of each of the letters’ stewards: the author (Porter herself), the scholar (the advanced Porter researcher), the curator (the librarians and archivists who manage the collection), and the reader (significant elements of Porter’s audience, including secondary school educators and students and non-scholarly admirers of her work). The center of the digital edition is the Letter Viewer:

The Letter Viewer’s multiple display pane model enables the visitor to view many interpretations of a letter simultaneously by clicking on a word (“Image,” “Transcript,” “Author,” “Scholar,” “Curator,” “Reader”) in the horizontal navigation bar under the letter title and dragging it to a display pane. I envision the Letter Viewer existing in an expansive HTML5-enabled plane like those of the Mapping the Republic of Letters project or the web-based Prezi software. Side-by-side comparisons of image and transcription are just the beginning of the opportunities afforded by this interface.

The Author view presents an interactive timeline display that illuminates information about a letter in the context of Porter’s biography and bibliography:

The Scholar view provides visitors with access to annotations, related research, and the downloadable “data” underlying the project:

The Curator view illuminates the provenance of the Porter letters. Porter served as curator of her own letters in her lifetime and invested great thought into her legacy. Revealing the lives of the letters in the stacks of the Library provides insight into the physicality of the collection and the authenticity of historical objects:

The Reader view offers opportunities for interactivity and invites the participation of several crucial elements of Porter’s audience:

As a whole, these wireframes offer a test case for how a digital project can represent the life and stewardship of an archival collection in a university setting. In other words, this digital edition, itself, is a reflection on the practice of assembling, structuring, and preserving digital editions. Someday soon the project will transform from skeleton to tangible digital physique, and in the capable hands of the Maryland team, I know it will be as radiant and as bright as Porter herself. I am excited (and no doubt Porter would be, too) to imagine these rich letters taking on a new digital life.

Wendy Hagenmaier is a 2012 Master’s Candidate at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She is blogging about her Capstone Professional Experience Project involving a digital edition of letters from the Katherine Anne Porter Papers (http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1532) at the University of Maryland. Jennie Levine Knies, Manager, Digital Stewardship, Beth Alvarez, Curator of Literary Manuscripts Emerita, and Trevor Muñoz, Associate Director of MITH and Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research, University of Maryland Libraries, are supervising the project, alongside MITH-alum Tanya Clement, Assistant Professor, UT iSchool.

“Contextual Futures: The Meaning, Structure, and Use of Archival Description” by MARK MATIENZO

Archival description is a cornerstone of the practice of archivy, and in most cases is the initial interface between an archival institution’s holdings and the audience for those holdings. While many authors within the archival profession have written both practical and theoretical articles on archival description, there is relatively little within the professional literature that provides a conceptual framework or formalization of archival description. When these frameworks or formalizations do exist, they are seldom interconnected to the critical trend in archivistics which has developed within the last twenty-five years. These two intellectual strands investigating the larger context of archives and archival description have the potential to inform each other and become highly intertwined. This presentation will discuss the meaning, structure, and use of archival description from a variety of perspectives. We will define archival description both abstractly and in terms of its constituent components and the relationships between those components. We will also determine what archival description intends to express and convey to the variety of its audiences, as well as its intended purpose from the perspective of the archivist. With these definitions in place, we will then investigate the strengths and limitations provided by these definitions. In particular, we will analyze the constraints that current archival metadata standards place on the transformative power of archival description. Finally, we will explore possibilities for reconceptualizing the structure and model for representations of archival entities that can leverage pluralistic recontextualization as well as emerging methods for sharing and relating information, such as the Linked Data paradigm.

This presentation will be held in the MITH Conference Room.

Mark Matienzo is a Digital Archivist at Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives department and Technical Architect for the ArchivesSpace project. Matienzo served as lead digital archivist for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded AIMS project (“Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship”), a partnership between Yale University, University of Virginia, Stanford University, and University of Hull. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the iSchool at Drexel University, where he teaches digital preservation. He received a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan and a BA in Philosophy from the College of Wooster. More information about his projects and research can be found online at http://matienzo.org/.

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.

Unable to attend the events in person?

Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The Project
I’ve been working on two issues. One is pointing. I now have a complete set of pointers from the reference file (ref.xml) to the witness files for locating spans of damaged text and page and fragment beginnings and ends for fragmentary texts. Of course, because nothing is simple, the direction of all of these will have to be reversed, so that the individual witnesses point into the reference text.
In addition, I’ve improved the tokenization process, so that I can process “rich” tokens, retaining data about the word in question (e.g., that it is an abbreviation, or deleted ….; hold a regularized spelling as well as the original) as well as simple tokens, and re-join a collation based on simple tokens with the complex tokens.

Text Geek Heaven
Along the way, I’ve discovered some joining Genizah fragments. The coolest by far on a technical, jigsaw-puzzle level is the four-way join between TS AS 78.69, TS AS 78.162, TS AS 78.235 and TS NS 329.286 (Cambridge). The four fragments adjoin yet another, TS E2.71. This will be featured as a Fragment of the Month of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit. Look for it there!
Cool in that that they join material from multiple cities are:

• TS E1.99 (Camb), MS heb. c.21/6, 8-11 (Oxf), TS F6.3 and Yevr. II A 294 (Pet), joining fragments from Cambridge, Oxford, and Peterberg, and:
• TS AS 85.270 (Camb) and MS R2339, fol. 1 (JTS), joining fragments from Cambridge and New York

Hayim Lapin is Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland. He currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Digital Mishnah on April 26th, 2012.

Team MARKUP collaboratively authored a post on the several phases of the project over on the Technoromanticism blog, so here I’ll address my personal experience of the project.

Six takeaways from the Team MARKUP project:

1. Affective editing is effective editing? One of my favorite quotations—so beloved that it shapes my professional work and has been reused shamelessly on my Ph.D. exams list, a Society for Textual Scholarship panel abstract, and at least one paper—is Gary Taylor’s reasoning on the meaningfulness of editing: “How can you love a work, if you don’t know it? How can you know it, if you can’t get near it? How can you get near it, without editors?”*. My interests focus on participatory editing because I want to help others get near the literature I love. Encoding my editorial decisions with TEI pushed me a step closer to the text than my previous non-encoded editorial experience, something I didn’t know was possible.

The Creature speaks! TEI for the first page of the Creature's monologue in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

My ten pages happened to be the first pages of the Creature’s monologue; hearing the voice of the Creature by seeing the handwriting of its true creator, Mary Shelley, gave me shivers—meaningful shivers accompanied by a greater understanding of important aspects of Shelley’s writing, such as the large editorial impact made by her husband Percy and the differing ways she crossed out or emphasized changes to her draft. Moving between the manuscripts images and the TEI encoding—so similar to my other work as a web designer and developer—also emphasized the differences in the writing process of my generation and the work that went into inscribing, organizing, and editing a book without the aid of a mechanical or digital device.

2. Project management. Because we didn’t know what to expect from the project until we were in the thick of encoding—would everyone be able to correctly encode ten full pages? how would we control quality across our work? what would our finished pages look like in terms of encoding depth?—we spent most of the project functioning as a large team, which was both sometimes as unwieldy as our large GoogleDoc (trying to find a time when eight busy graduate students can meet outside of class time is difficult!) and sometimes made sense (I was one of the few people on our team comfortable with GitHub and encoding at the start of the project, so I helped with a lot of one-on-one Skype, in-person, and email sessions early on). If I did the project over, I would have held a single Bootcamp day where we all installed and pushed within GitHub and encoded one page of manuscript up on the projector screen, then delegated my role as team organizer by dividing us into three subgroups. I also might have insisted on people agreeing ahead of time on being available for specific in-person meeting times, rather than trying to schedule these one or two weeks beforehand. I do think things worked out pretty well as they did, largely because we had such a great team. Having the GoogleDoc (discussed more below) as a central point for tech how-tos, advice, and questions was also a good choice, though in a larger project I’d probably explore a multi-page option such as a wiki so that information was a) easier to navigate and b) easily made public at the end of our project.

3. Changing schemas and encoding as interpretive. Encoders who started their work early realized that their efforts had good and bad results: because the schema saw frequent updates during our work, those who finished fast needed to repeatedly update their encoding (e.g. a major change was removing the use of <mod type>s). Of course it was frustrating to need to update work we thought was finished—but this was also a great lesson about work with a real digital edition. Not only did the schema changes get across that the schema was a dynamic response to the evolving methodology of the archive, it prepared us for work as encoders outside of a classroom assignment. Finally, seeing the schema as a dynamic entity up for discussion emphasized that even among more seasoned encoders, there are many ways to encode the same issue: encoding, as with all editing, is ultimately interpretative.

4. Encode all the things! Or not. Depth of encoding was a difficult issue to understand early on; once we’d encoded a few pages, I began to have a better sense of what required encoding and what aspects of the manuscript images I could ignore. Initially, I was driven to encode everything, to model what I saw as thoroughly as possible: sums in the margins, different types of overstrikes, and analytical bibliography aspects such as smudges and burns and creases.

Encode all the things... or not. Remixed from image by Allie Brosh of Hyperbole (hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com).

What helped me begin to judge what to encode was understanding what was useful for Team MARKUP to encode (the basics that would apply to future encoding work: page structure and additions and deletions), what was useful for more advanced encoders to tackle (sitting in on the SGA staff meetings, I knew that some of our work would be subject to find-and-replace by people more experienced with Percy and Mary’s handwriting styles), and what our final audience would do with our XML (e.g. smudges and burns weren’t important, but Percy’s doodles could indicate an editorial state of mind useful to the literary scholar).

5. Editorial pedagogy. Working on Team MARKUP not only improved my markup skills, it also gave me more experience with teaching various skills related to editions. As I mentioned above, acting as organizer and de facto tech person for the team gave me a chance to write up some documentation on using GitHub and Oxygen for encoding work. I’m developing this content for this set of GitHub Pages to help other new encoders work with the Shelley-Godwin Archive and other encoding projects. Happily, I was already scheduled to talk about editorial pedagogy at two conferences right after this seminar ends; the Team MARKUP experience will definitely become part of my talks during a panel I organized on embedding editorial pedagogy in editions (Society for Textual Scholarship conference,) and a talk on my Choose-Your-Own-Edition editorial pedagogy + games prototype at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute colloquium in Victoria.

6. Ideas for future encoding work. I’ve started to think about ways to encode Frankenstein more deeply; this thinking has taken the form of considering tags that would let me ask questions about the thematics of the manuscript using Python or TextVoyeur (aka Voyant); I’m also interested in markup that deals with the analytical bibliography aspects of the text, but need to spend more time with the rest of the manuscript images before I think about those. So far, I’ve come up with five new thematic tagging areas I might explore:

• Attitudes toward monstrosity: A tag that would identify the constellation of related words (monster, monstrous, monstrosity), any mentions of mythical supernatural creatures, metaphorical references to monstrosity (e.g. “his vampiric behavior sucks the energy out of you”), and reactions/attitudes toward the monstrous (with attributes differentiating responses to confronting monstrosity with positive, negative, and neutral attitudes). I could then track these variables as they appear across the novel and look for patterns (e.g. do we see less metaphorical references to monstrosity once a “real” monster is more prevalent in the plot?).

• Thinking about doodles: We’re currently marking marginalia doodles with <figure> and a <desc> tag describing the drawing. In our section of the manuscript, many (all?) of these doodles are Percy Shelley’s; I’d like to expand this tag to let me identify and sort these doodles by variables such as complexity (how much thought went into them rather than editing the adjacent text?), sense (do they illustrate the adjacent text?), and commentary (as an extension of sense tagging, does a doodle seem ironically comic given the seriousness or tragedy of the adjacent text?). For someone new to studying Percy’s editorial role, such tagging would help me understand both his editing process and his attitude toward Mary’s writing (reverent? patronizing? distracted? meditative?)

• Names, dates, places: These tags would let us create an animated timeline of the novel that shows major characters as they move across a map.

• Anatomy, whole and in part: To quote from an idea raised in an earlier post of mine, I’d add tags that allowed “tracking the incidence of references to different body parts–face, arms, eyes–throughout Frankenstein, and trying to make sense of how these different terms were distributed throughout the novel. In a book concerned with the manufacture of bodies, would a distant reading show us that the placement of references to parts of the body reflected any deeper meanings, e.g. might we see more references to certain areas of the body grouped in areas of the novel with corresponding emphases on the display, observation, and action? A correlation in the frequency and placement of anatomical terms with Frankenstein‘s narrative structure felt unlikely (so unlikely that I haven’t run my test yet, and I’m not saving the idea for a paper!), but if had been lurking in Shelley’s writing choices, TextVoyeur would have made such a technique more visible.”

• Narrative frames: Tags that identified both the specifics of a current frame (who is the speaker, who is their audience, where are they, how removed in time are they from the events they narrate?) and that frame’s relationship to other frames in the novel (should we be thinking of these words as both narrated by Walton and edited by Victor?) would help create a visualization of the novel’s structure.

I expect that playing around with such tags and a distant reading tool would yield even better thinking about encoding methodology than the structural encoding I’ve been working on so far, as the decisions on when to use these tags would be so much more subjective.

* From “The Renaissance and the End of Editing”, in Palimpsest: Textual Theory and the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (1993), 121-50.

Amanda Visconti is Webmaster at MITH and a Ph.D. student in the University of Maryland Department of English, where she focuses on textual studies, digital humanities practice, and Modernist novels. This post was a DH Now Editor’s Choice post on April 24th, 2012 and is cross-posted from LiteratureGeek.com.

“From Print to Digital: The Black Gotham Digital Archive” by CARLA PETERSON
Co-presenter: SETH DENBO

I’ve spent my MITH fellowship year working on “The Black Gotham Digital Archive.” My goal is to link an interactive web site, smart phones, and the geographic spaces of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn to create a deeper understanding of nineteenth-century black New York. The project is an extension of my book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale UP, 2011), and is motivated by my search for new media forms that will allow greater flexibility, interactivity, and potential for reaching a broader audience.

I structured my book around two principal concepts. The first was chronology, in which I took family history as a starting point to construct a broader social and cultural history of New York City’s black elite from about 1805 to 1895. The second was social geography, in which I illustrated the myriad ways in which members of the black elite inhabited Gotham, emphasizing how, in contrast to the all too familiar Harlem model, nineteenth-century black New Yorkers lived throughout the entire city, in different wards and neighborhoods.

My digital archive is structured around the same conceptual principles, but it relies on a different form of storytelling, one which inverts the relationship between text and image. In my book, word was the primary vehicle for telling my story and image functioned as supporting illustration; in the digital archive, image is the primary vehicle and word supporting document. Throughout the year, I’ve been working with MITH staff member Seth Denbo to implement this storytelling principle. Using Omeka as a platform, we have created a series of exhibits based on images, maps with clickable icons, narrative and descriptive text with links to ancillary material (manuscript material, newspaper accounts, books, collections, etc). The result is a greater sense of simultaneity (different historical actors doing different things at same time), mobility (movement through the streets of New York), and audience interactivity.

In the next phase of my project, I encourage further interactivity in at least two ways. The first is the creation of smart phone walking tours that will enable visitors to my archive to download an app that uses real-time geo-location information to provide them with targeted content from it; they can visit the neighborhoods discussed in the archive, view the locations of places mentioned, see images in context, and read the information provided. The second is to create a feature that will allow viewers to add their own stories to “The Black Gotham Digital Archive” and thus enhance our knowledge base of the social and cultural history of black New Yorkers in the nineteenth century.

This presentation will be held in the Special Events Room of McKeldin Library.

Carla L. Peterson is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, and affiliate faculty of the departments of Women’s Studies, American Studies, and African-American Studies. Peterson received her undergraduate degree from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She is the author of “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) (Rutgers University Press, 1998). She has published numerous essays on nineteenth-century African American literature and culture. Her newly published book, titled Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale University Press, 2011), is a social and cultural history of African Americans in nineteenth-century New York City as seen through the lens of family history.

Seth Denbo is Project Coordinator for Project Bamboo at MITH. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom and is a cultural historian of eighteenth-century England. Before coming to MITH he has worked on projects in digital history, the AHRC ICT Programme in Arts and Humanities and been Research Associate at King’s College London where he has been involved in strategic planning for a major European digital research infrastructure. He is also a convenor of a new seminar in digital history at the Institute for Historical Research.

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.

Unable to attend the events in person?

Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

This will be one of my last blog entries prior to the launch of the Black Gotham Digital Archive so it seems like an appropriate moment for me to step back and take stock of all things Black Gotham.

Looking back. By my count, since the publication of Black Gotham in February 2011 I’ve given some forty-five book talks with three more scheduled for this spring. I’ve spoken in venues as varied as bookstores, museums, historical societies, libraries, academic conferences, college campuses, genealogical societies, churches, and in front of audiences as diverse as scholars in the field, the general public, genealogists, and students from junior high to college. If you’ve missed any of these talks, you can always catch them on YouTube.

In addition, I’ve given several radio interviews ranging from NPR’s Leonard Lopate show in New York to black talk radio covering all regions of the country—Dallas in the South, Madison in the Midwest, California and Oregon in the far West.  I’ve even done some interviews for local New York TV, interviewed by some of my favorite media guys, Sam Roberts at NYC Channel 1 and Brian Lehrer at CUNY TV, Channel 75.  I must say I never seem to tire of talking about Black Gotham!

Beyond talking about the book, I’ve also continued writing about it.  I did two essays for the New York Times online series about the Civil War (“Dr. Smith’s Back Room” and “What Were the Women Doing?“) as well as a Q & A for the New York Times online “City Room.” All these pieces build upon ideas first broached in the book.

Finally, look out for the forthcoming NEH Humanities Magazine.  You’ll find another Q & A in it.

All this work has been well worth it since Black Gotham has just won the 2011 New York Society Library Award for History!

Looking forward. The Black Gotham Digital Archive launch is scheduled for May 20! That date is just around the corner but I feel there’s still so much left to do. Omeka is a lot trickier that it first appears. You can’t imagine how much work goes into creating a website that’s user-friendly. Behind every clickable icon, image, word there’s an enormous amount of trial and error going on.

I won’t give too much away, just enough to whet your appetite. I hope to have five exhibits to show: the first introduces users to my family; the second tours a few early Lower Manhattan places; the third invites users into two African Free Schools of the 1820s and 1830s; the fourth portrays members of the black elite at mid-century; and the fifth examines the fate of family members and their friends during the draft riots. You’ll find a lot more images in these digital exhibits than in the book as well as links to select archival documents where the nineteenth-century voice leaps at you right off the page and links to primary and secondary source books that are now online. With the digital archive, you won’t have to check the index and then shuffle back and forth among pages spread far apart. Just click and you’ll get a new item and information about it.  Enjoy!

Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland. She currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Black Gotham Archive on April 23, 2012.

“Enhancing the Bibliosphere: Bringing Historical Libraries to Life at LibraryThing” by JEREMY DIBBELL

I will discuss the Libraries of Early America project, an effort to digitize and make widely available the library collections of American readers from the early colonial period through 1825. Using the online book-cataloging site LibraryThing.com, scholars and volunteers from institutions around the country – including Monticello, the Boston Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the American Antiquarian Society and others – have begun the process of creating an extensive online database of early American libraries. Current subjects include Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Lady Jean Skipwith, James and Mary Murray, and other early American readers (some well-known, others obscure).

Unlike standalone institutional databases or online library catalogs, the Libraries of Early America collections through LibraryThing allow users to quickly and easily make comparisons between libraries (what books did John Adams and Benjamin Franklin have in common, for example, or what books were most commonly shared among all the Signers of the Declaration of Independence?), and to search collections which may not exist today in physical form or which are spread across multiple institutions and private collections. A reconstruction of the
multi-generational Mather Family library makes those titles widely available for the first time. Further, LibraryThing’s capabilities allow significant data about each book to be added to the record where known: transcriptions of marginalia, information about acquisition of
the title, the binding, correspondence about a given book, or even a link to a digital scan of the volumes (as with the John Adams collection at the Boston Public Library).

So far, data on more than 1,250 early American libraries has been added, with more information constantly being collected and included. I’ll discuss the origins of the project, sources and methods, and future plans and enhancements.

This talk will be held in the MITH Conference Room.

Jeremy Dibbell is the Librarian for Social Media and Rare Books at LibraryThing. He received his B.A. from Union College and M.A./M.L.S. degrees in History and Library Science from Simmons College. In the summers, he can generally be found at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, assisting with the school’s weeklong courses. Along with the Libraries of Early America project, Jeremy’s at work on a history of books and printing in Bermuda, writes regular columns for “Fine Books & Collections” magazine, and blogs about books and reading
at PhiloBiblos (philobiblos.blogspot.com). He can be found on Twitter at @JBD1.

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.

Unable to attend the events in person?

Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Emma Millon, Community Lead, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-9887).