The Digital: Inside and Outside the Academy

Posted on May 21, 2018 by LaQuanda Walters Cooper

Over the course of the academic year, I used the process of selecting, nominating, and discussing pieces for DH Now to explore the ways in which digital tools and methods are used inside and outside the discipline of history. At the beginning, my exploration was explicit: I looked for articles that discussed the tools and methods at the heart of the creation and development of new disciplines or fields of study, such as digital sociology, critical university studies, and black code studies. What interested me most about these articles was their emphasis on the ways in which these disciplines and fields are unique, provide greater contexts for their larger fields, and are inherently interdisciplinary in their approach.

New fields aren’t forming every week, however. My interest in the ways digital tools and methods functioned inside and outside the discipline evolved throughout the year to examine projects that challenge prevailing notions of how these tools and methods are or should be used. From crowdsourcing projects to digital storytelling projects to digital maps, digital methods and tools are being used not just to present new arguments, but to address erasures and silences in both the historical record and everyday American life.

In Why is Digital Sociology?, Tressie McMillan Cottom defines the space the field of study occupies—a space unoccupied by traditional Sociology, a space different from that of Communication Studies or Information Studies, but a space that should be engaging with other interdisciplinary fields such as Women’s and Gender studies, Black Studies, and Latinx Studies. McMillan Cottom asserts that Digital Sociology exists because digital societies exist, and they must be examined and explained: “Our job is to understand the means by which, the conditions under which, the context of internet technologies. We study process.”

Introduction: Wild Seed in the Machine opens the special issue of The Black Scholar titled Black Code. Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal articulate how Black Code Studies directly challenges those “conceptions of the digital that remove Black diasporic people from engagement with technology, modernity, or the future.” Black code studies centers both blackness and the digital both inside and outside academia.

Digital Humanities as Critical University Studies provides an overview of a panel presented at #MLA2018 by Roopika Risam, Beth Seltzer, and Matt Applegate. Each scholar focuses on a different topic: the ways that DH practitioners view campus communities; an analysis of alternative career skills in academic job postings; and tracing an alternate genealogy of DH practice that clarifies its focus on diversity & inclusion. Yet, the intersections are clear—the panel examines the way that DH work has reconfigured the use of academic labor is a response to campus austerity measures, and it attempts to align DH’s commitment to diversity and inclusion with the work of critical university studies.

Matt Vetter, Theresa McDevitt, Dan Weinstein, and Ken Sherwood ponder on the Wikipedia edit-a-thon as a digital intervention in Critical Praxis in Wikipedia: The Art + Feminism Edit-A-Thon. They discuss the gender gap present in Wikipedia’s editor corps (87% identify as male), and the subsequent systematic bias present in the free online encyclopedia. An edit-a-thon, held in conjunction with the Art + Feminism campaign, was an interdisciplinary direct response to the gender gap, supported by faculty and staff from across the university.

Lorena Gauthereau’s talk and Zotero workshop, Decolonizing the Digital Humanities discusses the archive as part of the colonial project: providing a framework for national knowledge & history, but also creating silences, specifically the erasure of indigenous histories and languages, as well as the presence people of Mexican descent from the Texas side of the Texas Revolution. As part of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project, Gauthereau’s talk and workshop focused on decolonization, and the questions DH practitioners must ask themselves to ensure that their projects are not reinforcing colonial thinking structures.

“Seeing White” is a series of podcast episodes out of Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. It uses uses history, politics, art, and personal experience to create a critical and comprehensive narrative of white America. While Eileen Cormier’s article How “Seeing White” is using audio journalism to critically examine whiteness in America explores the ins and outs of creating the series and focuses more on the direct connections to journalism, what is most useful here in this discussion is the interdisciplinary nature of digital storytelling.

A Digital Map Leads to Reparations for Black & Indigenous Farmers traces the experiences of African and Native American farmers receiving “people to people reparations.” This food and agricultural justice project, which evolved out of controversy surrounding white acknowledgment of their privilege in the food system at the Young Farmers Conference, is rooted in both history and cultural anthropology.

Collaborative Second Year Post

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Anne McDivitt

We’ve reached the end of our two-year stint as Digital History Fellows at RRCHNM. The time we’ve spent at the center has introduced us to various tools and techniques, provided the opportunity to work with scholars, given us insight into the process and progress of grant-funded DH projects, and enabled us to build a supportive cohort of students across the program that will continue to serve each of us as we move into the next stage of our programs. Below, each of us will expand on the experiences we’ve had at the center and reflect on the work we’ve done.

Anne

The structure of the DH fellowship helped me to gain knowledge and skills of digital history in a meaningful way—one that assisted me in learning more collaborative ways of doing history, achieving more skills to accomplish creating digital history, and understanding the reasoning behind doing DH. During my first year, we were able to travel between the divisions, which allowed for a relatively quick overview of the different ways that digital history is done. In the second year, I was placed into two divisions—one each in fall and spring—and I was able to delve further into particular projects within these divisions and work more closely with the members of each division.

The Center for History and New Media is structured in such a way that open collaboration and communication is possible. Although there are three divisions, there are open discussions for ideas, collaboration amongst the members, and many people that are very willing to help if needed. Through my work here, I’ve learned that many people in the Center use different tools to create their work, and this has helped me to become exposed to new methods. There are also several meetings in which ideas are discussed, and these meetings are productive for learning new ways to do Digital History.

I had a much easier time with my trio of Clio classes due to my time as a DH Fellow. When I came in, I had some experience with certain tools, but I did not feel confident in my ability to actually do digital history. Our classes have changed that, and my time at the Center was very complementary in that it seemed whenever we were doing work for the Clio classes, we were also working on something similar within our CHNM work. It also was a great establishment of skills for taking Clio 3, which involved much more programming. Because of my time at CHNM, I had previous experience with some programing languages, and it made the process of taking Clio 3 much easier so that I was able to produce a meaningful piece of scholarship in the end.

In the future, I plan on taking the ideas of collaboration, communication, and the skill set that I have gained from CHNM into my career as a historian. Since I plan on working in a public history setting, I feel that the ability to utilize these skills will further my ability as a historian.

I believe that one of the most meaningful activities of my time at CHNM was the building of relationships with my colleagues through our mentoring and support space. Although we were all working on different projects throughout the two years of our DH Fellowship, the availability of mentoring—first with the third years mentoring us and then us doing the same for the first years—allowed us to communicate, collaborate, and to learn from each other. I believe that this is one of the most important aspects of the DH Fellowship, as it fosters an environment that promotes this type of dialogue for our future careers and work, whether inside or outside the academy.

Mandy

The second year of the fellowship, for me, has been incredibly useful. I’ve really enjoyed being positioned on PressForward in the Research division. My work in this division has allowed me to further develop my programming skills, stay current with the latest DH scholarship through DHNow and the Journal of Digital Humanities, and participate in the development cycle for an open access piece of software. Our first year of the fellowship was focused on testing various tools and becoming familiar with different platforms and approaches to Digital History. This year I’ve moved into more of a building role and have had the opportunity to draw on the programming skills I’ve developed to contribute to the PressForward plugin. The structure of both the first and second years of the fellowship compliment each other well and has provided me with a broad knowledge of the centers organization, various digital history tools and approaches, as well as a chance to implement and build on what I’ve learned.

When I began this fellowship, the structure of the center was very unclear to me. However, through our rotations and experience in each division, I’ve become familiar with the current structure of the center, its origin, history, and its position in the larger field. CHNM has a long history of collaborating with teachers and schools, museums and libraries, as well as individual scholars and researchers to produce tools and projects that are innovative and sustainable. Participation in the Open Source community has been important to projects like Omeka or Zotero and has created a group of users who are active in testing and developing for these projects.

The digital history coursework we’ve been required to complete has often complimented our work at the center and helped to shape my views on digital history. Our practicum at RRCHNM provided practical hands-on experience while our coursework often provided a theoretical and sometimes historical perspective on Digital History methods, tools, and projects. I think taking these courses as a fellow gave me a unique perspective and some unique experience in Digital History.

Looking forward to the next year, I am planning to finish up prepping for my comprehensive exams and prepare my dissertation prospectus in order to advance to candidacy. Over the summer, I’ll be working on developing my dissertation prospectus and working to develop a proposal and plan for a digital component. My experience as a Digital History Fellow has shaped the way I’ve conceptualized using digital methodologies and techniques in my dissertation and has helped me to develop some of the skills that will be necessary. Because of the work I’ve been involved with at the center and my digital coursework at GMU, I have a realistic idea of what will be required to build a digital component.

The projects I have found most valuable during this fellowship have been projects like our THATCamp Topic Modeling project where we generated a data set about a center project and mined it. This project, in many ways, was a productive failure and I benefited greatly from it. Looking back on the project now, a year later, I realize many of the assumptions we made were flawed and we could have extracted and cleaned the data in both a reproducible and an easier manner. Projects where the fellows are given creative license to draw on techniques and concepts discussed in our coursework in order to create something based on a center project (or on center history) is, I think, extremely valuable for Digital History Fellows. These types of projects are also ideal for fostering and promoting mentorship among the fellows. Spencer Roberts was such an important resource for us during the THATCamp project and we couldn’t have completed the project without him. He offered advice on how to approach the project, explained programming concepts, and worked with us for several days on troubleshooting our python script. Through this project, as well as projects like creating the RRCHNM Omeka Archive for the 20th Anniversary, I gained valuable insight into what it takes to accurately and realistically conceptualize a digital project as well as experience thinking through critical choices like information architecture with the user in mind. We were often faced with unexpected challenges and messy data along the way. I’ve taken a lot away from these projects and I think they are a valuable and unique aspect of the fellowship that should be continued and implemented in a thoughtful way for future cohorts.

Jannelle

Recently the next cohort of PhD students visited GMU. As we sat with them and described the fellowship track and digital coursework, I began to reflect on my own experience along these lines. It is surprising how quickly we were incorporated into the activities of the center. The structure of the fellowship was remarkably useful in this regard- we were introduced to people and projects in a six week cycle that provided a low barrier to entry. As we moved across the center, we were able to identify the projects and skills that appealed to each of us. The second year took this process further. Moving into a single department meant that each of us was able to take a larger part in the work. Each of us was able to explore subjects of interest and work more extensively with others within that division. In my case this meant a fall semester in the Education division working on the 100 Leaders project and a spring semester in the Public Projects division working on the Mall project. Working more extensively in one division meant that each of us had to balance the responsibilities of the fellowship with our tasks in each division, but in most cases we were able to manage these well.

Working as a DH Fellow has definitely guided the direction of my coursework. I entered the program here at GMU with very little technical experience. Working at the center enabled me to build skill and confidence in these areas. It definitely gave me the confidence to enroll in Clio 3; Programming for Historians without these valuable experiences. I also found the Support Space to be a valuable aspect of my time at the Center. Bringing my challenges to the table and helping others with their work allowed me to create and build relationships with other students in the program. Oftentimes, we would spend time talking a problem out together and I found this type of collaboration particularly edifying. Last spring, Mandy Regan led a group of students in our Clio 2 class in a tutorial on 960 grid. This impromptu tutorial was a great example of the way that we were able to bridge our coursework with the fellowship. These activities have fostered collaborative relationships that continue to encourage us to share techniques and digital work with one another.

I’ve written on this subject in the past, but the preparation we did for the 20th anniversary was particularly meaningful for me. We started this work as a group and over the course of the summer I expanded the repository to include the many projects in the Center’s history. The process enabled me to read each one of the grants in the center’s history. Quickly I gained a better understanding of how the field has changed in 20 years. The project forced me to reconsider tools like Zotero as part of a larger vision. To think about projects like History Matters in terms of the other work the center has produced. To put them on a timeline and to view them not as discrete but connected by a thread or an idea. I learned more about iterative projects and the complexities of collaboration. Considering these things while I was working through my coursework enabled me to make connections with readings and class discussions. The experience encouraged me to see these projects from multiple perspectives.

When I reflect on my time as a fellow – this project encapsulates the value of the fellowship for me. It encouraged me to think about the legacy of digital history projects while also considering what is to come from the field. It is a project that will be difficult to duplicate, but one that would serve future Fellows in a meaningful way.

Next year, we all move on, either as a Graduate Research Assistant at the center or as a Teaching Assistant in the Department of History and Art History here at George Mason. Although our stint as Digital History Fellows is over, we all agree that it was a beneficial experience and we look forward to seeing what future cohorts will do.

PressForward Workshop

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Amanda Regan

This year PressForward has been focused on outreach. The PressForward team has been working to develop the plugin’s user interface and to help several pilot partners get PressForward publications up and running. As the fellow positioned on this project I’ve been involved with the continued development of the plugin. Last weekend, Amanda Morton, a former DH Fellow, and I were given the opportunity to give a PressForward workshop at the Advancing Research Communication and Scholarship (ARCS) conference in Philadelphia. The ARCS conference is “a new conference focused on the evolving and increasingly complex scholarly communication network.” Interdisciplinary in nature, the conference featured a set of workshops on Sunday and a set of diverse panels on Monday. Many of the panels focused on linked and open data, alternative publishing models, alt metrics and other ways of measuring impact, and open access digital repositories. The conference was a great opportunity to interact with organizations and communities that might be interested in PressForward and get an idea of what features might be important to these groups.

Our workshop focused on PressForward and covered topics such as the origins of the project, features that make the plugin standout, and an overview of how we use the plugin to maintain DH Now’s editorial process. Lastly, we set up a sandbox and gave users logins so they could follow along as we walked through important features of the plugin. We had about thirty people from libraries and science organizations attend and it was interesting to hear different ideas about how the plugin might be useful. The workshop was a nice break from some of the more technical things I’ve been doing this semester and it was great to get to talk about the project as a whole and how it fits into the scholarly communication ecosystem.

Below is a copy of the powerpoint we put together for the workshop.

Tweeting as Communication

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Anne McDivitt

Earlier this year, I decided to livetweet the RRCHNM 20th Anniversary Conference, which was significant to me in regards to discussing the topics of the conference itself, but also one of the benefits was that I was able to communicate with other historians about these topics. I received many replies, retweets, and even connected to other historians that would not have been aware of who I was without my tweets. It was a very useful experience, and I believe I gained more from this livetweet, in terms of professional connections and discussions, than previous livetweets I have done. This type of scholarly communication can link together historians that may not necessarily have connected without this type of technology, and it proved useful to me in engaging in the larger discussions surrounding the conference.

Reflections on #RRCHNM20

Posted on November 28, 2014 by Stephanie

I always know I chose the right profession when conference season comes around. I get excited for conferences like children get excited for Christmas and every year I plan my schedule around them. When I found out that the Roy Rosenzweig Center or History and New Media 20th anniversary conference landed on my birthday this year, it seemed appropriate.

However, the RRCHNM20 was unlike any history conference that I’d ever been to before. At times I was mesmerized by the conference and other times I felt like a complete deer in the headlights. I was expecting it to be like all of the other conferences that I attended and presented at in the past, where there was a fixed schedule of rooms full of people who stared at the speakers and nodded their heads constantly. This definitely was not the environment of my first digital history conference and–in a way– it was a lot more refreshing. Having the ability to have a say in what panels would be presented that day by voting in between sessions and watching the audience live tweet intently made me fell like I was a part of something more important and like my opinion mattered along with everyone else’s.

The sessions I attended dealt with subjects that affect the world of digital history and the entire historical community. How do we fight the cultural constructs of gender in our field and give women the same respect as men in centers? How do we collaborate more with public historians and museums in order to reach larger audiences? Perhaps one of the most important: how to we get the funds to accomplish all of these goals? These sessions were encouraging and inspiring because at time it felt like a digital history summit to take over the world instead of listening to panels with three different interpretations of the exact same subject. It was refreshing and terrifying.

The conference reminded me exactly how new I am to digital history and that while I’ve learned so much in one semester (thanks to RRCHNM) that I still have a long way to go in the field before I truly understand enough to feel comfortable making assertions in panels or offering my own opinions in front of the digital historians whose articles I’ve read in class. I felt very much like a green horn, especially after Dr. Robertson turned on the large screen in the conference room with the live #RRCHNM20 tweets. All of a sudden my 20 tweets a minute turned into 2 tweets an hour because I realized these digital history giants would be reading my Twitter banter. I started questioning whether on not I had to right to comment on digital history when so many people in the room had built its foundations.

While my own fears got the best of me at times, I was constantly surprised and comforted by the amount of the support in the sessions and throughout the conference. I was approached by many digital historians who knew that I had the words “graduate student” tattooed on my forehead. Many people asked me questions about my research, the support I’d received from RRCHNM, and why I chose George Mason. It was fun to explain that I’d chosen George Mason because of RRCHNM and how I wanted to become a part of something bigger in our field and I knew digital history was what would get me there. The digital historians at the conference made me feel –even though I had my own concerns over how much I actually knew–that I belonged in this group of tech-savy historians.

The conference also reminded me how lucky I am to be at RRCHNM. Listening to all of the stories about Roy, his legacy and what that means to digital history, left the biggest impression of what exactly I am a part of. I go to work every day for a center that not only changes our conceptions of history, but reaches audiences at the academic, public, and international level with our projects and tools. RRCHNM’s 20th anniversary conference has reminded me of why I got into history into the first place. It’s all about changing the way we view our pasts and teaching to large audiences.

Reflections on Public Projects

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Stephanie

Last week Alyssa, Jordan, and I completed our final rotation in Public Projects. When I first arrived at RRCHNM, Public Projects was one of the divisions that I was most eager to experience due to my background in public history. I am in the process of finishing up my public history certificate at Southern Miss and I have always wanted work with or pursue an entire career in public history projects. This love for public history is what made me excited to learn and understand the digital work that goes into some of the RRCHNM projects that used since I was an undergraduate.

Our first week in Public Projects was one of the most difficult, but definitely one of the most educational. As my blogs have shown from our rotations in Research and in Education, my coding skills definitely need some work. However, our mentor that week—Megan Brett—was exactly what I needed to understand code life a little better. She helped us understand SSH and was able to help me and my PC keep up with everyone else and their Macs. For once I was never left behind with Alyssa and Jordan two or three steps ahead of me because tutorials weren’t adequate enough for PCs. Megan was able to help me understand my windows PowerShell and never became frustrated when I forget one of the dozens of commands when trying to manipulate Omeka. Whether it was Megan’s patience or the fact that I’ve been here for an entire semester and things are finally starting to stick, my first week in Public Projects made me feel like I was finally getting the hang of things around the center and that I could actually “talk tech.”

In week two with Public Projects, the first year fellows were sent on a mission to conduct mobile testing on Histories of the National Mall. The experience was exciting not only because we got to spend an entire work day on the National Mall, but because we were able to find some of the issues with the site on our phones. Since I’m the one of the three of us with the least flashy technology (PC and Android kid), it was fun to see Histories of the National Mall working well and at a good download speed, whereas Jordan’s was a little slow and poor Alyssa could never find a wifi network for her ipad. It was my own personal win for the week! However, we were able to find a few content problems, specifically with Ghost Sites, that we were able to bring back to Public Projects.

In the last two weeks of Public Projects, we were tasked with adding newly submitted documents to the 9/ll Digital Archive. The center recently received donated materials from Brian Sullivan who worked for the FAA around 9/11 and we were asked to submit them to the Omeka site. We reviewed the 17 documents that were submitted and then created descriptions and other portions of Dublin Core that were needed before the documents can go live on the site. On one of our days going through the documents we were even able to watch a documentary (Please Remove Your Shoes) that was also submitted by Sullivan so we could add it to the collection. Aside from absolutely never wanting to fly again after going through the FAA documents and watching the documentary, I really enjoyed going back to one of the reasons I wanted to become a historian—going through primary sources.

My four weeks in Public Projects was a great experience, not only because I’m finally starting to find my way around the center, but because I was genuinely interest and excited about the content we were able to learn and create. Sharon and Shelia made all three of us feel like we’d been in Public Projects the entire semester and it was such a smooth transition to begin working with everyone in the division because of how welcomed we felt. The things I learned in Public Projects, especially working with Omeka, are something that I will be using throughout the rest of my time at Mason and hopefully for a dissertation project. I’m excited about the possibility of working more with Public Projects in the future and cannot wait to learn more.

Reflections on the Education Division

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Stephanie

Over the last four weeks the first year fellows had the opportunity to work in the Education division of the RRCHNM. Since the start of our first year fellowship, working in the Education division was something that I was really looking forward to—especially since a lot of the projects they were completing were with National History Day. As an undergraduate and MA student at Southern Miss, National History Day in Mississippi was always one of my favorite times of the year. Having the opportunity to work with middle school and high school students on History Day projects and offering an outlet for students who were more gifted in the liberal arts has given me something to be proud of over the years and I was excited to do some work with the Education division on the national side of History Day.

Working in the Education division was more than just learning new aspects of something that I was already interested in, it was like coming back to my nice “cuddly blanket” of history that I was a little bit more familiar with. While I enjoyed working with Research immensely, after having my ups and downs with Python coding and reaching the mid-point of my first semester as a PhD student, the Education division made me feel like I was “coming home” and it reminded me that I was still useful and could learn new things at a faster pace.

The first assignment we were given was to locate photographs of the 100 leaders for the 100leaders.org website. While I initially thought this task would be simple, I quickly learned a lot about the overly complicated world of copyright laws. I had always assumed that famous paintings and photographs became famous because they were open access and freely used enough by the public to become recognizable and iconic—e.g. Washington Crossing the Delaware. Oh, how wrong I was. While I had a feeling it would be difficult to find open access photos of Walt Disney (because Disney is notoriously good at copyrighting everything), I was more than shocked to discover just how difficult it was to find an image of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, etc. These are some of the most famous and recognizable figures in American history and it is almost impossible to find a copyright free image of them for public use. Even other—not as well-known—leaders such as Ray Kroc, and Rachel Carson would exceedingly difficult to find images of due to copyright laws.

In order to show how important these leaders were without using their own images, Jordan, Alyssa, and I had to get a little creative with our searches. For instance, since Susan B. Anthony only has one or two open access pictures, I found free images of women protesting for their right to vote. For Ray Kroc, I found an image of a retro McDonald’s and so on. While it was frustrating at times trying to find new ways to represent the 100leaders, it was also an exciting challenge that reminded me of why I love history so much and chose it as a career. The hunt can be frustrating, but when you find that one image that brings everything together it makes you feel like Indiana Jones. There were definitely many “booyahs!” yelled out from my side of the fellow’s table.

Finding these images made up the majority of our work in Education and I learned so much from it. I’ve had the opportunity to teach History 101 (pre-history to 1500CE) twice at the university level and after working on the 100 leaders project I’m aiming to teach a world history course again this summer. Going through bios, finding pictures, and learning about figures that I’d never heard of before has made me want to revamp my lectures and inspired me to look at different ways of teaching. While I’m sure this wasn’t necessarily an intended lesson from Education, I’m so grateful it reminded me of how much I love history, research, and teaching.

In our time in the Education division we were also asked to do some testing on the 100leaders website before it goes lives in November. Sitting down at the Education table and giving Thomas Edison a constant rating of “1s” is what I call a pretty fantastic day. However, outside of my historical hate of Edison, I discovered that I’m interested in how these websites are created. Getting to give feedback on whether the “slider” was working properly or how many times the system would lock up depending on voting made me want to explore more of the technical side of Education. Even though we didn’t get to work with the design and construction of the website, I was constantly shocked by how many different components went into creating a simple slider and how many options there were for creating the pages for voting. I had the same curiosity when we were asked to create a manual for the 100leaders website once Education hands the website off to National History Day. I was in charge of creating a step-by-step guide for editing resources on the website. Writing this portion of the guide helped me to better understand the inner workings of a wordpress website and also let me see all the ways these sites can be manipulated. While we weren’t able to help create portions of the website, it definitely made me want to explore more with coding for future use.

I will definitely miss working in the Education division. I looked forward to going to work every day and working on topics and projects that I love. I’m excited by the possibility of working in the Education division again and will actively keep up with their projects throughout the rest of the semester.

Legacies and Sources

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Amanda Morton

There have been some interesting discussions in the last week or so re: maintaining legacy sites and making sure 404 errors aren’t the most common decoration on your site about the history of cats during the French Revolution. The thing is, this problem has been around since…well, since Oregon Trail was the most well-known form of digital history scholarship, and there really isn’t a solution.

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Digital Humanities Now: Designing Information Flow

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Spencer Roberts

This week, our group met with the team behind Digital Humanities Now, an online compendium and journal that searches out and disseminates important scholarship throughout the digital humanities. Although the team has an official editorial staff of three (a number that likely fluctuates with funding), the time required to survey the many thousands of sources can quickly overwhelm even the most efficient team.