Making History Podcast: The Blog

THE PAST’S DIGITAL PRESENCE
4:15-5:45pm
Saturday, February 20
Whitney Humanities Center
Theorizing the Digital Archive
Room 208

• Stewart Campbell, Columbia University, “Eugène Atget and the Digital Archive”

Art-historical self-critique through an analysis of the commercial practice of photographer Eugène Atget remains one of the great tasks undertaken in this discipline in the past 20 years. The most prominent example is Molly Nesbit’s Atget’s Seven Albums, published in 1992, which significantly altered the way art historians understand the archive’s place in historical research. This presentation investigates the institutional discourse of Atget’s work and argues that the Museum of Modern Art’s digital catalog extends the institutions careful editing of Atget’s work required to support the narrative of modern photography, which is often incompatible with the multiple discursive spaces that his images occupy. In comparison to its vast collection of his work, totaling around 3000 images, the 58 pictures visible online to the public are easily codified in aesthetic categories that were not the primary concern for Atget when he produced his them. As we digitize the exhibition space of photography, we must reconsider not only whether, and if so, in what ways, this space replicates the discursive possibilities of the physical archive, but also what methodologies we must produce for investigating and critiquing the role of power in digitally regulating the discourses of photographic history.

• Julie Meloni, Washington State University, “Toward a Realization of the n-Dimensional Text”

In this paper I build on recent and ongoing discussion among practitioners of humanities computing about the remediation of texts and the relationship between printed texts and their digitized counterparts, with specific regard to the impulse to capture and recreate the experience of the text in multiple dimensions. In the 2007 PMLA issue on “Remediating Genre,” esteemed literary scholars discuss the concept of the database and its potential uses and misuses with regard to digital scholarship, but this discussion lacks a certain technical depth and detail in the same way that a discussion about literary texts by computer scientists might lack certain critical nuances. After addressing some of the realities of technology that have gone missing in discussions surrounding the use of databases in the study of literature, I return to Jerome McGann’s theories of quantum and n-dimensional texts as indicated in Radiant Textuality and “Marking Texts of Many Dimensions,” and I offer a tangible starting point toward implementing a system that allows the scholar to study texts in the multiple dimensions McGann describes (linguistic, graphical/auditional, documentary, semiotic, rhetorical, social), both in isolation and combined.

• Alexandre Monnin, Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University, “What is a Tag: Digital Artifacts as Hermeneutical Devices” [abstract not available]

THE PAST’S DIGITAL PRESENCE
4:15-5:45pm
Saturday, February 20
Whitney Humanities Center

How-To Digital Humanities
Room 120

• Shane Landrum, Brandeis University, “Camera, laptop, and what else?: Hacking Better Tools for the Short Archival Research Trip”

This talk examines the finer points of doing archival research with the aid of a digital camera, drawing on my experience with these methods at about 15 archival repositories across the US. Here, I focus on my work with the papers of the US Children’s Bureau, a large (1400 cubic foot) collection held by the National Archives, which holds important primary sources about American women’s history. First, I discuss some practical details of hardware and procedure for shooting research-quality photos of archival materials. Second, I describe the techniques and tools I’ve found useful for organizing my research images, both at the library and away from it, and I explore some of the challenges I think historians face in using commercially-available software tools to organize our research. Finally, I propose some ideas for future software–desktop, cloud-based, and social— that could make this style of work less frustrating and open new avenues for creative, collaborative research.

• April Merleaux, Yale University, “Reimagining Ethnic Studies in the Era of Digital Research” [abstract not available]

• Sharon Teague, University of Toronto, “Accessing Wills: MS Access as a Tool for
  Historians”

My paper is divided into four sections. First I describe why I chose Access as my research tool and how I developed my Wills’ Format. Second, I illustrate, through a tour of my data base, how I used Access’ data-crunching ability to generate the raw material I needed to answer questions posed by my dissertation. Third, I discuss how Access, in general, or the S/T format developed to analyze wills, in particular, might be adapted for use by other scholars. And finally, I touch upon the issue of bias, posing a series of questions that I hope will spark a discussion: does the very act of placing data in searchable “boxes” of our own creation, in fact, bias our results?

THE PAST’S DIGITAL PRESENCE
Saturday, February 20
2:30-4:00pm
Evolving Reading Practices
Room 208

• Katherine Liu, Folger Shakespeare Library, “The Folger’s Evolving Response to the Information Age: Digital Image Database” [abstract not available]

• Rachael Sullivan, University of Texas, Dallas, “Dickinson Meets DoubleClick: Remediating Poetry”

On the Internet—where banner, pop-up, and in-text ads interweave with content—literature and seemingly unrelated words and images collide. When poetry is remediated on the Internet, the boundaries we set between the poetic object and contextual frame become apparent as choices that are worth interrogation. Emily Dickinson’s poetry appears on a variety of scholarly and nonscholarly web sites, some of which are filled with online ads. Without a doubt, her words have come a long way from the manuscripts and fascicles that once filled the drawers of her desk in Amherst, Massachusetts. Yet, tracing origins does not always bring clarity to texts. As Sharon Cameron points out in Choosing Not Choosing, unity or understanding is not produced through reading Dickinson’s poems in a fascicle context. “What is more radically revealed,” Cameron writes, “is a question about what constitutes the identity of the poem” (4). Online advertising, as it becomes more intrusive and targeted, also reveals questions about what constitutes a literary text and a poem in particular. The Internet is not so much a threat as it is a new textual dimension from which we can learn to be more attentive to language and the interpretive choices we make as readers.

• Austin Graham, University of California, Los Angeles, “The Digitized Blues: Listening to Langston Hughes in the Age of the Online Sound Archive”

The digitization of sound and the advent of the mp3 have made the music of the early twentieth century, once confined to the wax cylinder and the phonograph record, considerably more accessible than had been the case even ten years ago. As a result, twenty-first-century scholars are now enabled to resurrect the largely forgotten musics that once inspired artists of the modernist period. “The Digital Blues” explores these new interpretive possibilities by focusing on the blues poet Langston Hughes, finding that the online availability of century-old blues records — by black and white singers alike — situates his work within an interracial aesthetic that has too often gone unheard.

THE PAST’S DIGITAL PRESENCE
2:30-4pm
Saturday, February 20
Whitney Humanities Center

Finding the Words: The Digital Linguistics Database
Room 120

• Eugenia Kelbert, Yale University, “Ménage à trois, or
  General Theory of Communication” [abstract not available]

• Paulina Bounds, University of Georgia, “Large-Scale Digital Audio Archiving”

This paper is a case study of how to create a digital audio archive which can be used by both scholars and the general public based on Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States turned into digital media. LAGS will be publicly available, with over 7000 hours of linguistic interviews illustrating how language was spoken in the 70s throughout the southeast United States. Reel to reel tapes with the interviews were digitized into uncompressed .wav format, so they could be used for acoustic phonetic analysis. The files were then divided into 4 to 5 minute segments and labeled to create an index. The segments were then converted into .mp3 audio files so they could be easily downloaded in a reasonable time via the Internet. Digitally archiving LAGS permitted long term preservation since the audio tapes have long past their rated life. Possible applications of this database include language analysis, cultural analysis of the informant’s stories and documentation of historical information provided during interviews

• Micah Stupak/Garret Voorhees, Rochester Institute of Technology, “Digital
  Kiksht” [abstract not available]

THE PAST’S DIGITAL PRESENCE
12:45-2:15
Mapping History
Room 120

• Julia Mansfield/Scott Spillman, Stanford University, “Mapping Eighteenth-Century Intellectual Networks”

The Republic of Letters united European and American scholars, scientists, and statesmen before the modern, university-based academic world supplanted it. Participants used letters as their main form of communication, and those letters remain as valuable evidence of far-flung exchanges within Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean. What did those correspondence networks look like? In what sense might they be described as “cosmopolitan”? Benjamin Franklin serves as a natural test case for the model of an eighteenth-century cosmopolitan. His duties as a legislator and diplomat created an enormous volume of correspondence. We analyzed approximately 4,300 letters written or received by Franklin and classified them according to recipient and type (personal, official, or business). When we graph letters by type during Franklin’s residence in Paris (1776-1785), the volume of official correspondence overwhelms the volume of private correspondence. Merchants, financiers, and civil servants are among the top correspondents in Franklin’s network across his lifetime. Data from Franklin’s letters show that diplomacy and trade created the cosmopolitan scope of his network. Surprisingly, Franklin’s network is more cosmopolitan in scope than that of a quintessential member of the Republic of Letters, the French philosophe Voltaire. Yet its cosmopolitan character depends on business and bureaucracy, not just philosophy.

• Scott Nesbit, University of Virginia, “Layers of the Past: GIS, Social Process, and Contingency in Historical Mapping”

Scholars have increasingly called for new tools that would enable them to organize the large digital collections that are increasingly available online. In a previous era of massive documentary publishing, historians at the Carnegie Institution and elsewhere found that the Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States provided a helpful addition to the large collections of suddenly accessible documentary records. This paper takes its cue from those efforts to suggest that an online atlas would be a useful complement the recent large-scale digitization of historical documents.

• Simon Wiles, Dharma Drum Buddhist College, Taiwan, “Buddhist Authority Databases”

The nexus of Digital Humanities and Buddhist Studies presents a number of interesting challenges, and has already met with some notable successes. In this paper some of the challenges that we face are introduced, and some approaches and solutions which have proven beneficial in our work at Dharma Drum Buddhist College are discussed. Some general principles are outlined, which are applicable to all kinds of digital resources, and which are aimed at ensuring that our digital resources are as valuable as possible, for as long as possible. In particular it is argued that, as far as digital resources are concerned, the integrity of content and data should always take priority over modes of consumption, and that data structures and interfaces must be designed with inter-operability and integrability as a main concern. The Buddhist Authority Databases are introduced as an example of a project designed according to these principles which meets several specific needs in Buddhist studies. Finally, the /Gāosēng Zhuàn/ (高僧傳) GIS project is presented as a very brief case-study which demonstrates some of the many benefits of this approach.

THE PAST’S DIGITAL PRESENCE
Saturday, Feb 20th
10:15-11:45
The Material Object in Digital Culture
Room 208

* Jane Tippett, University of Delaware, “Physicality vs Practicality: The Book as Object in the Age of Digitalization” [no abstract available]

* Heather Ball, City University of New York, “The Alternate Medieval Medium: Experiencing Medieval Manuscripts through Digital Technologies”
Digital technologies have found a use in almost every aspect of scholarly research and communication. Though the Internet proves advantageous by increasing access, it can also be detrimental to novice researchers. By solely encountering medieval manuscripts through a computer screen, users sacrifice the visceral experience that accompanies viewing the actual manuscript. Misinformation is another drawback when searching for medieval content online. How can a user discern authoritative sources from subjective and non-factual sources? One consideration that must be incorporated into further study is how digital surrogates and technologies are affecting the original manuscripts as well. If digital access increases, does access to the original become restricted? This paper will seek to answer the above questions, and provide fodder for a thorough, scholarly debate.

* Jessica Weare, Stanford University, “The Dark Tide: Digital Preservation, Interpretative Loss”
Jessica Weare’s paper “The Dark Tide: Digital Preservation, Interpretive Loss, and the Google Books Project” takes as its case study one obscure 1920s novel’s digitization for the Google Books Project. As the subject of a post-publication libel suit, the first edition of Vera Brittain’s The Dark Tide was emended with a sticker apologizing for its semi-scandalous content. During the Google Books digitization process, Stanford library’s copy of The Dark Tide was stripped of its sticker; the only extant digital copy of the text is thus an incomplete one. Weare’s paper examines what sort of preservation the Google Books project aims for, what sort of preservation literary scholars might expect, and how university libraries mediate between the two.