Wrapping Up the Fellowship in Public Projects

This spring 2018 semester I continued to work in the Public Projects Division. Since I first arrived in this division in spring 2017, I have primarily worked on the Hearing the Americas NEH planning grant to help in the production of a prototype and a future implementation plan. The design document that concluded this planning grant was completed by the time we arrived back from winter break. This semester, I assisted with the next phase of the project: to submit an NEH production grant drawing from the progress we made during the planning grant period in order to build and launch the website. I helped to draft a preliminary version of this grant proposal that is currently in its last week of editing by the Hearing the Americas team before being submitted for consideration in this grant cycle. Working on this project has continued to be a dynamic way for me to draw from and expand my knowledge in music, digital, and public history. Being involved in the grant writing process, throughout the planning grant and production grant phases, has also provided invaluable experience learning how much work goes into drafting a substantial grant application.

In addition to Hearing the Americas, I also began working on the Papers of the War Department and Race and Ethnicity in Advertising projects, which both primarily involved migrating content from one platform to another. When I began working with the Race and the Ethnicity project, Ken Albers had already migrated the content into Omeka. My job was to reconstitute essays from the original website that explored the racial, gendered, and ethnic histories of advertising. Basically, this required converting textual essays into formats that made sense in Omeka’s exhibit builder. Some of these essays translated more easily than others, so it was a creative challenge to find the best ways to structure and illustrate each essay with content from the website.

My other major task this semester was to help prepare content in Papers of the War Department for migration into Omeka S. This digitized archive serves as an important resource by reconstituting documents thought to have been lost in a fire at the US War Department in 1800. These digitized resources are connected to Scripto, a crowdsourcing transcription tool also being updated in this website migration. I have primarily assisted fellow Graduate Research Assistant Alyssa Fahringer by going through the crowdsourced transcriptions she has identified that are incomplete and/or need approval. Unlike Hearing the Americas, this project is far outside of my comfort zone. Although I have done a substantial amount of transcribing from oral histories and other sound recordings, I have not often had to work from handwritten text. As these documents were written between 1784-1800, there is a steep learning curve to adjust to reading the handwriting styles and letter-writing conventions of the time. I will continue to work primarily on the Papers of the War Department project over the summer, so I’ll have some time to sharpen these skills. 

Toward a More Creative DH

Inspired by a MediaCommons survey thread I wrote about at the end of my first year as a DH Fellow, I decided to spend my second year tracking how digital humanists are embracing creativity in their work. The MediaCommons thread asked: “What is the role of the digital humanities in transforming and responding to the arts?” and featured a number of responses how about putting the arts and DH into conversation creates the potential for more engaging, ethical, and exciting work in the field. Because I study music history, I am always looking for new ways to engage with sound, and sensory history more broadly, in the context of digital work. In the field, I noticed not only a reinvestment in podcasting as a medium, but also projects that take sound as its central point of study, including heightened attention to archiving and making sound artifacts available through the work of projects like the Radio Preservation Task Force and The Great 78 Project.

This attention to creativity also came through in the ways that DH scholars have assessed and defended the field. For example, Sarah Bond and Michael Kramer both raised important questions this year about what happens when we reconsider the roots of DH, and how this can lead to more open idea about what, and who, should be considered as part of the field. A number of posts also explored more creative digital pedagogy, and how it can create space for our students to approach history and technology on their own terms in more personally and academically productive ways. Finally, other scholars expressed a more creative approach toward archival work by continuing to broaden and critique what is considered an archive and being forthright about how scholarly and artistic philosophies can influence one another.

I expect that these threads will grow as DH scholars continue to push the boundaries of DH work and make room for ethical and radical scholarship. This work requires a more creative approach, as it seeks to reshape DH around truly decolonizing, anti-racist, and feminist practices. Another important aspect of this thread is the ability for scholars to discuss failure as much as success as a way to learn from one another as the contours of the field continue to expand. As Sean Michael Morris says in the context of what he calls “ethical online learning,” these kinds of projects can serve as important sites of resistance for our students to become “imaginers of an education less technicist, and a world less oppressive.” By continuing to let DH transform and respond to the arts, there appears the promise of a less technicist, less oppressive future for all of us.

Cities and Memory

Cities and Memory is a global project that seeks to document and reimagine the worlds of sound that shape our experiences. A map incorporates sound artifacts from over 75 countries, geolocating each artifact to a point on the map alongside a remixed version created by a sound artist. The website is available for open submission year-round, but also puts out calls for more specific collections of sounds including Sacred Spaces, exploring the sensory experience of different sites of worship, and Protest & Politics, exploring the soundscapes of protest across the world. This project provides an interesting new archive for scholars of sound and sensory history to think through the soundscapes of historical moments that can be useful for digital projects as well as simply thinking through the ways that sound structures the world around us.

Sensory Maps 

Kate McLean’s project, Sensory Maps, creates maps of urban space focusing on what have historically been designated as the three “lowest” senses: touch, taste, and, most specifically, smell. In McLean’s words, Sensory Maps seeks to revive smell perception as “an invisible and currently under-presented dataset with strong connections to emotions and memory.” McLean’s “smellmaps” use data visualization and digital mapping to reimagine the ways that we experience urban spaces by tracking spheres, densities, and categories of smells that permeate various cities. She also gathers data and increases engagement through “smellwalks” and inviting people to send in “smellfies” that help to create a more varied and personalized understanding of the powerful links between smell and place. This is not only an innovative and experimental digital approach, but speaks to a growing emphasis on sensory history that takes seriously the social and cultural construction of the senses and the relationships between them.

Playing Ancient Music Without An Instrumentby Tristan Roddis

This piece discusses a Hack Day put on by the CogApp team in association with the National Library of Scotland in order to develop a new approach toward Optical Music Recognition (OMR). This Hack Day was meant to demonstrate how the study of sound can be central to digital humanities work by identifying ways that we can train computers to “read” sheet music as we have with more traditional textual sources. This approach includes many of the limitations that Optical Character Recognition does, requiring clearly printed sources and often needing human editing, but does provide new ways to think about reading and searching music. The team has also made their workflow available, and invites collaboration with historians and musicologists in order to determine the most useful approaches to a continued OMR practice.

Mapping Racism and Assessing the Success of the Digital Humanitiesby Sarah Bond

This piece by Sarah Bond responded to the disparaging
The Digital-Humanities Bust article published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here, she argues for the importance of the field by pointing to the ways that digital mapping projects have helped to redefine the ways we think about the history of racism and segregation. An interesting point in this article is the way Bond connects GIS mapping projects to W.E.B. DuBois’ 19th century visualizations that were meant to highlight the same patterns of discrimination. In this way, Bond’s piece not only makes a case for the continued importance of DH work but also connects it to a longer history of analog visualizations by African American scholars, forcing us to rethink the roots of the field as longer and more diverse than the DH narrative often allows.

10/19/17: Global Jukeboxes & Celestial Monochords—Alan Lomax, Harry Smith, & the Digital Study of Folk Music @ Amériques/Europe: Les Humanités Numériques En Partage?, La Rochelle Universityby Michael Kramer 

Michael Kramer’s transcription of a talk he gave at La Rochelle University echoes a similar point in Sarah Bond’s work. Here, he asks what happens if we extend our history of the field to include the work of folklorist Alan Lomax and artist Harry Smith. Kramer argues that Lomax’s conception of the Global Jukebox and cantometrics was inherently computational, and that Smith’s philosophy toward song collecting for his
Anthology of the American Folk Song referenced many computational theories. Kramer argues that “turning to Lomax and Smith’s engagements with the digital and computation sheds light on the profound tensions that arise when embedded cultural practices—often in the oral tradition— are treated as digital data.” Thought about in the context of Bond’s work, lines of questioning that extend, complicate, and diversify the origin story of DH can open up more a critical and creative history of the field.

Student Showcase: The 1968 Berkeley Folk Music Festival, jacob frazer goes audio-visual.” by Michael Kramer

Michael Kramer’s work in the classroom also speaks to thinking through digital work more creatively, and using the digital as a platform for students to share their work with a wider audience. This video by his student, Jacob Frazer, is just one of several student showcases from Kramer’s Digitizing Folk Music History seminar. This video creates an nonlinear and nonnarrative exploration of the 1968 Berkeley Folk Music Festival, and presents digital storytelling as an essential medium of DH pedagogy that can allow for deeper explorations of source material and more affective arguments.

2 Campuses, 2 Countries, 1 Seminar by Emily Dolan and Jonathan Sterne

This piece written by Emily Dolan in the Department of Music at Harvard and Jonathan Sterne in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill discusses a joint class they co-taught across their two campuses. The course, Bodies and Machines at McGill and Sound Studies at Harvard, explored the cultural meaning of the instrument in various contexts. This piece discusses the value and continued limitations of doing this kind of experimental, distance learning education. Dolan and Sterne maintain that sound and video chat technology remain some of the biggest inhibitors to creating successful telecourses, however they also note that they came to see these glitches as moments when students could laugh, unwind, and process information, reframing our discussion of technical problems as potential opportunity rather than essential lack.

Ethical Online Learning: Critical Pedagogy and Social Justice by Sean Michael Morris and Lora Taub-Pervizpour

This piece by Sean Michael Morris and Lora Taub-Pervizpour was initially given as a joint keynote for a Digital Pedagogy Lab event at the University of Delaware. The talk takes seriously the need for educators to stop adapting to or tolerating technology, but rather engaging with it critically on its own terms and developing a new set of “best habits.” This allows us to create more open, creative learning environments that can provide students’ with the space to express themselves and amplify those ideas in more creative and meaningful ways.

What happened to Sit-In? : Digital Archival Erasure and Struggles for Open Access by Lauren Tilton

This piece by Lauren Tilton responds to the MediaCommons survey question, “How do issues of erasure (redaction, deletion, censor, displacement, etc.) in digital spaces impact memory? What can these erasures reveal?” Tilton’s response highlights the problematic reliance we have on corporate archives, particularly for those who study media history of the twentieth century. In thinking through how the emergence of sensory history in digital humanities practice is developing, the questions that Tilton raises must remain central. As she argues, these corporate media archives “remain in significant control of the public memories of the liberation struggles as they did during the era,” and academics must resist becoming complicit in this cycle of control and erasure.  

Bias, Perception, and Archival Praxis with Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez by Thomas Padilla and Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez

In this interview, Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez discusses her philosophies and approach as the Processing Archivist for Latin American Collections at Princeton University Library. She maintains the importance of decolonial and feminist practices in archiving, and cites a number of other scholars who have published on this topic. She interestingly describes her own genesis as an archivist as rooted in the found object collages of Dadaist artist. In particular, she notes Kurt Schwitters’ “unconventional way of record keeping and memory construction” as a reminder of what we lose through digital processes like cleaning data and prioritizing searchability. Her application of artistic philosophies to the work of the archive reminds us of the importance of keeping creative possibilities central to our continued work in DH, particularly so as not to replicate colonial systems of memory and erasure.

Public Projects Update

I spent the Fall 2017 semester in the Public Projects Division. Since the end of the Spring 2017 semester, as well as over the summer, I have been primarily working with the Hearing the Americas team to complete an NEH planning grant. This digital project will explore the history of the early music industry by recontextualizing digitized recordings from the LOC Jukebox, UCSB Cylinder Archives, and the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project. Working on this project has been an excellent opportunity to connect my interests in music history and digital public history. I first conducted content research, reading through secondary sources on the history of the early recording industry and locating primary sources that can complement the digitized recordings. Drawing from this research, I created some sample content that reflects the kinds of information and pathways that the site will provide. This sample content included Music Trivia questions, which will give users in depth explorations of important artists, songs, or themes, as well as sample Omeka item pages that include artists, songs, and genres. In addition to textual sources, I also helped to compile a sample set of visual primary sources including advertisements and catalogs that will be included as content as well as guide the aesthetic design.

I then worked with Megan Brett to create user personas as part of the website design process. First, we identified a number of potential audiences for the website, including Music Fans, Musicians, and Music Writers/Record Collectors. From here, we developed a questionnaire to gauge the kinds of knowledge and expectations people might bring to the website. We first completed in-person interviews with potential users based on a shortened and open-ended version of the questionnaire. Finding people to interview at concerts and other music-based events proved difficult, but the conversations we collected helped us to form the longer-format Google Forum and provided useful feedback to shape the personas. The online survey utilized Google Forum’s option to create various pathways, which we used to separate questions for musicians from other persona types, and asked a series of questions about the user’s knowledge of music history, possible interests, and online behavior. We planned an outreach strategy to disseminate the survey on various social media platforms, utilizing hashtags like #MusicMonday and #MusicHistory to reach the widest possible audience. We initially expected a sample size of about 25 responses, and were pleased to greatly exceed that number, reaching 75 responses by the end of the first day and finally closing the forum at nearly 100 responses. All of the information we gathered formed the basis for writing five user personas including composite biographical paragraphs and bullet points that outline potential user behavior.

We sent this sample content and user personas to our designer, Kim Nguyen, who prepared wireframes and mood boards that reflected the potential information architecture and aesthetics of the website. Using Kim’s wireframes as a guide, I sketched out the potential pages of the website with sharpies and paper in order to do a round of paper prototyping. I represented each page of the the website on an individual sheet of paper, allowing for as many foreseeable pathways as possible. I then did prototype testing with people representative of three user personas: Music Fan, Musician, and Music Writer. In this format, the tester “clicks” through the website by pointing to the various options drawn on the page, and I would then switch to the page they selected to simulate a potential pathway. While working through these pathways, the tester also provided feedback about the organization of the website, their expectations about what they would hope to find on each page, and questions about parts of the site that seemed confusing or counter-intuitive. This allowed us to not only test out the information architecture developed over the last year, but provided some very useful feedback from people who had more distance from the project and were able to view the prototypes with fresh eyes.

I completed this semester by writing up user experience narratives that drew from the user personas and the paper prototyping. These narratives described scenarios in which people might find and engage with the website, highlighting content like Music Trivia, annotated recordings with musicological comments, and explorations of important artists and genres. All of this work will be included in the final collaboratively-written design document that will be submitted to the NEH in the Spring 2018 semester. Working on this project has given me insight into the process of designing a large-scale digital history project, as well writing and completing grants. Helping to write the user personas and user experiences for the design document was by far the most challenging part of this semester, but it has given me valuable experience in a style of writing not often included in graduate education.

Digital Humanities as Resistance

We spent our first year as DH Fellows tracking and discussing the blog posts that filtered through DH Now, and were asked to track specific themes. I decided to follow posts where DH and activism intersected, especially as the recent campaign, election, and administration made political conversations hard, even irresponsible, to ignore. Before Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, the grey literature of DH had had a slightly more intellectual focus. There were certainly many people thinking about critical theory in DH, but those advocating for DH as activism in its own right was not as visible of a conversation. Of course, there are some exceptions here, most obviously in the form of media scholars, and particularly those who incorporate feminist critical theory into their work (for instance the #TransformDH community that formed in 2011). Aside from these groups, much of the DH discussion was focused on how to study or support activists working in the age of multimodal movements like Black Lives Matter. Not surprisingly, the discussion has become not only more critical but more urgent. It seems that DH scholars from all disciplines started to take stock of what we do well—promoting open access knowledge with a balance between theory and praxis (although not always an equal balance)—and found new ways to deploy those skills as acts of resistance.

What we see now is representation from a large group of digital humanists—archivists, educators, artists, historians, media scholars, librarians, literature scholars, sociologists, and others—working towards common political goals. Not only is DH facing a large-scale crisis over funding and resources (nothing new except for its scale), but, more importantly, over the emergence of a rising tide of fascism and anti-intellectualism. For example, conversations about open access have shifted focus from intellectual goals to political ones. Pedagogical posts are refocusing on ways to not only promote computer literacy, but also how to teach strategies of resistance in the era of misinformation. In this new climate, public engagement, critical studies, and activism are informing each other, and seem to be working to break down the disciplinary boundaries that have divided digital humanities into distinct fields of theory and practice. It is probable that the narrowing of these gaps is part of DH’s natural evolution as a field, but the current administration certainly seems to have sped up the process. This selection of posts that follows is a very small sample of the many groups and voices working to reshape DH into a field of resistance.

Beyond the hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice (February 29, 2016)
This report from the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University represents an early, concerted effort by scholars to explore Black Lives Matter and other web-based activist movements. With attention to the various groups and platforms involved in the fight against police brutality, this report explores the nature of protest on the open web and how multimodal approaches to activism can work to level the playing field for oppressed groups.

Creating Culturally Sensitive Solutions to Digital Violence (September 29, 2016)
This post, from the Digital Media + Learning Central blog, announces the Center for Solutions to Online Violence. This effort, funded by DML, seeks to find new ways to address intersectional experiences of violence online. This post showcases the project’s PI, Jacqueline Wernimont who speaks to the importance of applying feminist theory as we approach archives of knowledge and spaces of digital learning in order to build trust and foreground safety. From Wernimont: “a person’s ability to navigate what is an increasingly complex digital life is really important…We have to attend to those costs and how they are differentially born by particular people first — not as an afterthought.”

Ed-Tech in a Time of Trump (February 2, 2017)
This post by Audrey Watters on Hack Education traces computing machines to their military roots— “Command. Control. Communicate. Intelligence.”—and interrogates the implications of these ideas on our educational systems. She connects the potential uses of student analytical data collection to prior fascist attempts (both in Nazi Germany and the US) to track, control, and eradicate groups of people. She calls for a reevaluation of the relationship between student and institution, and implicates higher education institutions within the growing surveillance state. Watters’ desire is clear: “Now is the time for an ed-tech antifa, and I cannot believe I have to say that out loud to you.”

Our Work, Our Selves: Using Our Tools for Resistance (February 16, 2017)
This post by Des on Hack Library School calls for archivists to realign their personal and professional goals with their political ones, and provides a brief historiography for inspiration. The title, a reference to the landmark feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves (now a digital source for knowledge about and access to women’s health care), plus the choice to open with an Audre Lorde quote situates this post squarely within a long tradition of feminist theory in DH activism. The questions raised here are meant to inspire ideas for HLS’ first Twitter Chat, and represents how new groups are forming as a reaction to the Trump administration.

The Urgency of Public Engagement (February 26, 2017)
In this post, Katina Rogers joins a number of scholars in reacting to the anxieties of the Trump administration’s effect on DH, and on the Humanities largely. Drawing from her experience as Director of Administration and Programs of the Futures Initiative at CUNY, Rogers calls for a new framework of academia in which we no longer prioritize insular paths to tenure, but rather recognize and reward outward paths to work with and serve communities. She centers the relationship between “innovation, equity, and public engagement” as one that can transform academia from an ivory tower to a public resource. She calls not only for a cultural shift, but for a concerted effort to train graduate students to pursue public-facing work.

Foregrounding the Question (March 15, 2017)
This post by professor Elizabeth Lenaghan argues not only for computer literacy in undergraduate writing seminars, but to find ways for students to engage with questions of source verification. Her approach, in her words: “we examine the way that concepts such as truth, authenticity, and originality—though often presumed static and absolute—are constantly shifting and morphing in relation to time, context, and audience.” They focus on both identifying and creating “media hoaxes, plagiarism, and remix culture” in order to develop the skills to easily recognize these in their online practices. Although she has been teaching this way since 2013, she argues that it is even more critical in our current “post-truth” era.

Teaching Digital Rhetoric in the Age of Fake News: Media Literacy and Source Evaluation in the First-Year Writing Classroom (March 17, 2017)
This post by composition instructor Elizabeth Fleitz argues for a new conception of digital literacy in the composition classroom. She first makes a plea that we not take the idea of “digital natives” for granted by assuming they have the skills to both use and assess their online worlds. In order to provide her digital native students with the skills to assess web content, Fleitz employs the strategies of fact-checkers in the classroom. She argues that not only does this fulfill requirements for students to learn to question and challenge sources broadly, but will equip them to develop political ideas and identities in the age of fake news.

What is the role of the digital humanities in transforming and responding to the arts? (March 2017)
Art has largely been considered a realm of political action, while the humanities has largely been seen as one of knowledge production. This survey question posed by MediaCommons received several answers from vastly different disciplines—artists, art historians, ethnographers, ecocriticism, #TransformDH feminist scholars, and others—demonstrating the ways that similar concerns are connecting DH scholars across disciplines. One respondent, Jarah Moesch who identifies as a “queer artist-scholar” offers this answer: “Perhaps, then, these rigid lines between so-called disciplines are actually the ‘problem’…I am also wary of the idea that the Digital Humanities should somehow transform “The Arts,” that this type of scholarship should necessarily play a role in art, while not considering how art might also transform the Digital Humanities.”

How Libraries Can Trump the Trend to Make America Hate Again (April 24, 2017)
In this post, Jarrett Drake, an important voice for archivist-activists and advisor for the Documenting the Now community and toolkit, argues that not only do libraries have a responsibility to serve the needs of their communities, but that this agenda should—must—extend into activism. In his words: “libraries should be on the frontlines to fight fascism because the control of information and ideas is central to the spread of fascism, and thus libraries will be forced either to endorse that spread or encumber it.” He traces earlier moments when libraries and librarians were active voices against oppressive regimes and ends with three main calls to action: assert authority, center communities, and never normalize.

Wrapping up with Public Projects

We ended our first year as Digital History Fellows in the Public Projects Division. As someone with career goals in Public History, I was most excited to get to work in this division. However, doing this year-long rotation through the Center allowed me to witness the strengths of all three. I was able to work with projects I wasn’t familiar with, and become more familiar with ones I was, as well as gain a broad understanding of digital humanities work. It was also interesting to see how the various parts of the Center function with distinct tasks, work styles, and guiding philosophies, yet come together to create one cohesive Center.

Over these last six weeks we were able to experience the many and varied projects that the Public Projects division balances. First, we got familiar with Omeka, one of the legacy projects of the Center. With the help of other graduate students, we learned how to install Omeka sites on our own server space provided by the Center. This is certainly a useful skill to take with us, along with the command line practice we received in the Research Division and Clio II. We were also given access to an Omeka S dev site that allowed us to also play with the some of the new features this platform offers. In particular, I spent some time with the CSV import function by putting together a spreadsheet with metadata for various early jazz album covers. The CSV import creates distinct items for each row, and allows for batch uploading of collections. Practically, having the content in the form of a spreadsheet will help in the future when sites need to be re-built quickly for new rounds of testing.

Speaking of testing, we also spent a fair amount of time working with previous DH Fellows to test new plug-ins like batch editing and comment blocks, or bugs reported in the Omeka forum. We had done a bit of testing while in the Education Division, so I was mildly familiar with the process. However, the kind of testing we did in Public Projects necessitated a very organized strategy between several of us to replicate issues and determine exactly which actions were causing the site to break. Thanks to our testing guru, Jannelle Legg, I learned how to organize a testing process to track and pinpoint our actions separately and together, and to provide useful feedback for the dev team.

In between testing, we also were introduced to Public Project’s long-running Papers of the War Department project. This project has two main parts. One, it is a digital collection that attempts to reconstitute the records lost when the War Department caught fire in 1800 by bringing together thousands of documents from archives around the country into one digital collection. Two, the Scripto tool developed at the Center turns this collection into a crowd-sourced transcription project in order to make the items searchable for researchers. Laura and I were give usernames and were asked to dig around the site to explore the various materials available, and then to transcribe some items to understand the process. The Public Projects Division continues to maintain Papers of the War Department and is still receiving new transcriptions from users and keeps an updated blog. It is an example of how the Center is not only good at developing new projects, but maintaining older ones to keep them accessible and relevant.

Our final task in the division was my favorite, as it allowed me to fuse my interest in music, public, and digital history. For the last three weeks, Laura and I helped with preliminary research for the Hearing the Americas planning grant. This project will attempt to contextualize a collection of early recordings digitized in the Library of Congress’ National Jukebox, so the bulk of our research was exploring musicians and songs that appear in this collection. Laura and I spent a lot of time working collaboratively to piece together the biographies of several musicians and genealogies of songs that not only revealed connections between people in the early music industry, but within larger themes in American history. I am looking forward to continuing this work over the Summer and during my second year as a Digital History Fellow in the Public Projects Division. Not only do I get to explore topics and themes that are interesting and relevant to my own research, but I get to witness, almost from start to finish, the process of writing a grant proposal that leads to the kinds of projects Laura and I have worked on over the last year.

Research Division

Laura and I spent the first half of the Spring 2017 semester in the Research Division. We were given a range of tasks, some of which definitely took me out of my comfort zone. First, we were asked to work through the Python tutorials on The Programming Historian. After that, we worked through the HTML and CSS tutorials on Code Academy. At the same time, we are taking Clio II (or, Data and Visualization in Digital History), which is introducing us to R programming. So, I suddenly went from having no real familiarity with any coding languages, to having at least a cursory understanding of four. Although a bit overwhelming at first, I can now see the benefits of this kind of exposure, as it better enables me to assess other digital history projects and have realistic understandings of how this could fit into my own research. We were also asked to try out some of newly acquired HTML and CSS skills by designing a mock-up redesign for the Press Forward website. After spending an entire workday tinkering with row sizes, fonts, and colors, we produced a mock-up that really wasn’t so bad, and was actually pretty fun to build once I started to get the hang of it.

During our time in Research, we were also involved with creating proto-documentation for Tropy, the division’s newest project. Tropy will provide a way for researchers to annotate, organize, and search through the increasing number of digital images we collect from physical archives, digital archives, and/or born-digital sources. This task placed me much more squarely in my comfort zone, as we were asked to think about metadata, copyright, and user testing, and write up outlines for future project documentation. It was also useful to get a kind of inside look at Tropy through early testing to understand the process of developing projects that are meant to offer specific functions to a wide audience. I expect that Tropy, much like Zotero, will become a vital tool for many researchers. After all, most historians (whether they consider themselves digital or not) can relate to the problem of having too many images and too little metadata.

We spent the last couple of weeks in Research discussing the work of historians—what is it that historians actually do—and what is gained and lost as the field becomes more and more digital. It seems to me that as we engage with representations of the past—whether in the archive, through mediating technologies like microfilm, or by searching through digitized records—the process of locating, reading, and contextualizing sources always obscures as much as it illuminates. Our discussions raised several questions along these lines. Doesn’t the process of rooting through dusty boxes or searching in Google shape what we can say about the past in analogous ways, and shouldn’t we be more transparent about the paths we take through both? Also, what is unique about the space of the archive? What do we lose when we can’t stumble upon unexpected ephemera, when provenance is replaced by keyword searches, or when marginalia isn’t retained in scanning? Conversely, what do we gain in digital research spaces? These theoretical questions are certainly things I plan to keep in mind as I progress through my career as a digital historian.

An Eight-Week Education

Our first rotation through the Center sent us to the Education Division (ED). Although set back from the main workspaces of the Center, it soon became clear that the ED’s work is central to the reputation and productivity of the Center. At our first weekly meeting, we were introduced to the progress board, a large white board listing each project in the ED and details about the progress of each. Every Tuesday morning, members of the ED would update the group on the progress of each project, of which there were many, and record those changes on the board. This all seemed a bit overwhelming at first, but by the end of our rotation I was (mostly) able to keep track of the many projects the ED is constantly (and successfully) juggling.

We were given a chance to work on more of these projects than I would have imagined we could have time for in eight weeks. We first started working with Jennifer Rosenfeld, Associate Director of Educational Projects, on the Understanding Sacrifice project with the American Battle Monuments Commission. This project gives history teachers an opportunity to visit an American military cemetery, research and write a eulogy for a fallen soldier in that cemetery, and create a publicly-available lesson plan around what they’ve learned. To help with this project, we were asked to transcribe a few of the recorded eulogies spoken at the gravesite of their fallen soldier, as well as edit the written biographies of these soldiers and the lesson plans that each teacher developed. Many of these stories were quite moving, and the lesson plans provided interesting ways to engage students with military history in new ways, even outside of the history classroom. Jennifer also asked us to help test the online course for George Mason University’s Digital Public Humanities Graduate Certificate. Helping with Jennifer’s projects allowed me to see how the ED’s projects can directly enrich the relationship between instructors and students.

Kelly Schrum, Director of Educational Projects, assigned us to a number of projects that allowed us to work with other members of the ED. With Nate Sleeter we helped to organize a testing workshop for Through the Doors of Stratford, a website that will allow students in Arlington, Virginia to connect the history of the Civil Rights Movement and massive resistance to their local community through online modules. We also worked with Nate on Hidden in Plain Sight, a course that allows teachers to gain certification credits by learning to narrate history through primary sources, and were able to develop our own modules. I decided to bridge my interest in music history with the public-domain treasure trove that is the WPA materials at the Library of Congress to design a module that uses Federal Project Number One as a window into American life in the 1930s. This was one of the more engaging and challenging assignments we were given, providing an opportunity to contribute our own research to a successful DH project.

Kelly also had us work with Sara Collini to help develop Eagle Eye Citizen, a free, online interactive that allows students to solve challenges about Civics and History using primary sources from the Library of Congress. Our role in this project was quite varied, as we were asked to do everything from search through Library of Congress’ online sources, write and review parts of the challenges, search for sheet music and interviews that would be engaging for students, and make sure that this information was entered correctly into Drupal. We were also asked to work the Eagle Eye Citizen booth at the National Council for the Social Studies Conference, which was a fun and lively conference. It was great to see teachers genuinely excited about the launch of this project next Fall, and already thinking of ways to integrate it into their classrooms and curriculums. Sometimes, working on these kinds of projects comes with the worry that no one else will be as excited about your project as you are. The response at the conference (and the Center’s general track record) showed that this isn’t the case!

My last major contribution in the ED was to help Kelly develop a project to record historic sheet music for use by students and teachers. This allowed me to reference my love of music and cultural history, and consider various questions and concerns that characterize the beginnings of any scholarly project, DH or otherwise. This entailed envisioning what kinds of recordings we would make and what pieces of music we would select, how the recordings would be made available, who might be interested in using it, and, perhaps most importantly, who would be interested in funding it. Although still in its early stages, it is a project that I am very excited about, and hope to stay involved in even as I continue to cycle around the Center.

I really enjoyed my time working in the Education Division. Although my role was small in many of these projects—much of the groundwork had been done before we arrived in the ED—it felt good to work on projects that will help teachers and students engage with the past. It also made clear to me—in ways that our previous time in the seminar portion of fellowship could only do theoretically—the range of projects and partnerships the Center has developed, even just within one department. Personally, the ED showed me how good it feels to be part of a professional and courteous group of people who are all willing to meet on Tuesday mornings to return, once again, to the progress board, with the sole condition that the meeting starts with a plate of cookies or a piece of cake.

Next up: Research.

Playing With History

We began our first year as DH Fellows in a seminar where we were asked to choose a project from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s 20th anniversary site, and develop an Omeka exhibit that tells the history of that project. The Lost Museum, an early online game developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, immediately caught my attention. The Lost Museum allows users to move through a virtual recreation of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, destroyed by an unsolved arson attack in 1865, while investigating potential suspects and learning about 19th century social, political, and cultural history (to learn more, visit the exhibit). A professor assigned this game in a class I took as undergraduate, and I remember discussing the project not just for its historical content, but as a historical artifact itself. It has been updated since then, but still maintains the characteristics of an early internet website: playful, creative, and idiosyncratic. Developing this exhibit has allowed me to explore the early days of digital humanities projects, and the direction the RRCHNM has gone in since then.

The emergence of new media gave rise to a small but ambitious group of scholars who imagined nontraditional ways of presenting their work to the public. And that’s what it really seemed to be about—gaining a wide, public audience. Of course, students and teachers were also important to this work, as can be seen through the Center’s first project, Who Built America? Other academics would continue to read and publish articles and books, and would benefit from the many database and source-driven digital humanities projects to come. But, for a rather brief moment, the popular appeal of gaming and dynamic storytelling seemed to be the next frontier for presenting historical scholarship. The crew that developed The Lost Museum—a mix of academics and programmers from the American Social History Project at CUNY and the very new Center for History and New Media at GMU—recognized and explored these potentials.

Since these early days, however, there has been a relative absence of gaming from the digital humanities landscape. Gaming is able to extend the immersive narrative forms of earlier new media, particularly documentary film. The exploratory structure of gaming can not only lead to deeper engagement with the historical content, but also the process of doing historical work. However, these projects take a long time (the seed of The Lost Museum started in 1994 and the project wasn’t completed until 2005) as they require a highly collaborative group of people with the skill, time, and money to see a project through. The formation of digital humanities centers during this period were an attempt to balance this always-shifting equation of skill, time, and money. And in many cases, and certainly the case at CHNM, projects often built the center while the center built the project. So why, then, haven’t we see more creative output from these centers?

Working on this exhibit helped me to understand how much funding opportunities forced many digital humanists and the Centers they worked for to be more pragmatic about what they could do and how long it would take them to do it. This is not to diminish the work of Centers. The projects and tools that the CHNM has created over the last two decades are engaging and useful, and have helped to define the state of digital humanities today. And there are many other Centers across the world doing similarly influential work. To funders, a game is simply riskier than a content management system, or a database-driven project. At least in the case of The Lost Museum, gaming projects tend to take on a life of their own and require a high level of flexibility. And, once completed, the question remains: will anyone want to play it? However, as someone interested in digital humanities and popular culture, it doesn’t seem right to confine my subjects to the pages of a monograph, or even the rows and columns of a content management system. In the case of The Lost Museum, the elements of the story effectively begged to be made into a game—a real historical mystery (investigative) set inside of a museum (immersive) that contained artifacts and oddities (interactive). If people could no longer visit P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, visiting the virtual space was the next best thing.

Lately, it appears that DH scholars are reflecting on where DH has come since these early days and where it might be going. Promisingly, The NEH has started to fund more gaming projects, which suggests a possible shift towards more creative projects in DH’s future. It also appears that a general nostalgia for the 1990s has set in. The playful, dynamic, DIY-style of early internet design does not seem as anachronistic today as it might have five years ago. Instead, it seems fun, and familiar, and maybe a little comforting. And although this 90s nostalgia could be a passing fad, it could also be something worth nurturing. With the CMS takeover of the Internet, more DH gaming projects could possibly offer an escape not only for users, but for creators as well.