Texas Digital Humanities Conference 2015
http://hdl.handle.net/10106/25655
2024-03-28T19:44:09ZDigitized Diaries and the New Manuscript Archive
http://hdl.handle.net/10106/25728
Digitized Diaries and the New Manuscript Archive
Henderson, Desiree
As Digital Humanities has taken root across the disciplines, one field has particularly benefited: Diary Studies. In the past, the study of a manuscript diary was determined by access to the archive where the diary was held. Some diaries were transcribed and published, making them more accessible to a wider reading audience, but losing the tactile experience of engaging with the handwritten text that many scholars consider a necessary component for complete and accurate manuscript analysis. Digital humanities methods and platforms appear to provide the best of both worlds: By digitizing a diary, access is enhanced but by providing a visual reproduction of the original manuscript, it remains possible to discuss issues central to manuscript scholarship such as chirography, material appearance and construction, and evidence of revision or editorial changes. Other techniques developed within digital humanities also promise to enhance the study of digitized diaries including crowdsourcing diary transcription or content, visual enhancement of hard-to-read manuscript pages, and keyword searches. However, although this new manuscript archive promises to expand scholarly research into diaries and pedagogical options for teaching diaries, it raises new questions particularly around the issue of privacy. Although privacy is thought by many to be the central defining feature of the diary as a genre, Diary Studies scholars have long grappled with the question of how to define and interpret the concept of privacy as it relates to unpublished, manuscript diaries. Many scholars of diaries have addressed the combination of discomfort and curiosity that drives us to read another person’s intimate life story, and raised editorial and ethical questions about whether a diary’s contents should remain private. Digitized diaries require us to return anew to these questions because reading a diary online rearranges the relationship between reader and text: What does it mean to encounter a private manuscript via a digital platform, particularly one that encourages readers to participate in making the text legible? How does the form of access either make visible or occlude the boundary between public and private self-expression that is often central to a diary’s contents? My talk addresses these conceptual questions by providing an overview of several different forms of diary digitization including: 1) Visual reproduction and transcription, 2) Crowdsourcing transcription and mapping, and 3) Recovery and reconstruction. Among the recent digitized diary projects I will discuss are:
Alfred Rosenberg Diary (US Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Elizabeth Robinson Farm Diary (The Smithsonian)
The Emilie Davis Diaries (Villanova University)
Livingstone's 1871 Field Diary: A Multispectral Critical Edition (UCLA)
Martha Ballard’s Diary Online
Operation War Diary (Zooniverse)
The goal of my talk is to introduce these exciting new resources for scholarship and teaching, identify best practices for diary digitization from the perspective of a reader, scholar, and teacher, and theorize how modes of access may impact the textual analysis of the private diary as a genre.
Twenty-Minute Presentation
2015-04-11T00:00:00Z"Endangered Archives, Digitization, and the Possible Futures of Historical Research in Latin America”
http://hdl.handle.net/10106/25727
"Endangered Archives, Digitization, and the Possible Futures of Historical Research in Latin America”
LaFevor, David C.
This presentation introduces the audience to a multi-year collaboration among digital humanists, historians, translators, and local team members in Cuba, Colombia, Brazil, and Florida. Funded by the British Library Endangered Archives Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other sources, our team has digitized, published, and is in the process of translating over a half million pages of manuscript documents pertinent to the African diaspora in Latin American.
The most important institutional support has come from the British Library. In collaboration with several Canadian and Latin American universities, we have equipped and trained students in several developing countries how to preserve, digitize, and study documents central to the writing of local, regional, and transnational histories. The British Library’s initiative has led to locating, digitizing, and disseminating manuscript documents from the pre-Industrial age and has resulted in hundreds of projects on all inhabited continents. These documents, photographs, and sound recordings, most of them in peril due to climatic, political, and religious conflicts have the potential to alter our understanding of colonialism, migration, demography, and pre-Industrial cultures in general.
The presentation will give a visual and narrative account of several of these projects over the last several years. It will focus on the challenges of doing this type of work in the field, navigating bureaucratic processes in Latin America, and the remaining challenges in making this type of preservation and research more accessible to scholars and a more popular audience.
Advances in OCR have qualitatively changed the nature of historical research and writing in the last decade. My particular work as a historian would not have been possible even ten years ago. As OCR continues to advance, the documents we have already placed in the public domain have enormous possibility to reform our work on slavery, religious change and syncretism, demography and other areas of history where quantifiable data has been nearly impossible to accumulate due to constraints of time and geographical mobility.
For example, the oldest serialized demographic data in the Western Hemisphere is held in deteriorating birth, marriage, death and burial registers kept by the Catholic Church in most places until the mid-to-late nineteenth century. While we continue to find and digitize these documents, their systematic and quantitative information will yield a wealth of data that will likely alter the necessarily impressionistic conclusions we have made about much of colonial history.
As part of the presentation I will also explain funding opportunities for digital humanists, show images from work in the field, and relay anecdotes that illustrate the multiple benefits to writing history and conducting fieldwork that digital technologies have and will continue to make possible.
Twenty-Minute Presentation
2015-04-11T00:00:00ZDigital Oral History Collections: Implications for Innovation in the Humanities
http://hdl.handle.net/10106/25726
Digital Oral History Collections: Implications for Innovation in the Humanities
Nunes, Charlotte
This presentation will theorize the implications of digital audiovisual archives for humanities scholarship and pedagogy. The proliferation of digital oral history projects available online means that they comprise an important category of new digital media, but there are few precedents for analyzing their contents and incorporating them into innovative research and teaching. Increasingly, universities and academic libraries support digital initiatives such as the University of Texas at Austin’s Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI), which provides server space for large collections of audiovisual primary source material pertaining to issues of human rights internationally. However, despite the clear potential of the HRDI for compelling multimedia digital scholarship, there remain few models of student or faculty work incorporating the HRDI or comparable audiovisual archives. And while digital publications such as [in]Transition, a collaboration between MediaCommons and Cinema Journal, offer venues for scholarly works that analyze, argue, and present multimedia, multidisciplinary humanist content, pressing theoretical questions accompany such publication opportunities. What are the rhetorical challenges of incorporating audiovisual digital archives into literary analyses? What ethical concerns are raised by integrating ostensibly unmediated narratives (oral histories) with mediated narratives (film and fiction) in digital scholarship?
Drawing on case studies from my Spring 2015 undergraduate English class titled “Freedom and Imprisonment in the American Literary Tradition: A Multidisciplinary Approach,” I will examine both the practical and the theoretical challenges posed by incorporating digital oral history collections including the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP), the StoryCorps Slavery By Another Name Oral History Project, and the Rule of Law Oral History Project. In the course we will consider 19th, 20th, and 21st century American literature, broadly construed to include fiction, poetry, film, oral history, and autobiography, alongside scholarly sources ranging across the fields of anthropology, journalism, history, and sociology. As part of their work for the course, students will complete transcription, auditing, and video-editing tasks in collaboration with the Texas After Violence Project and the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA). I will argue that building, analyzing, and enhancing access to digital oral history collections can transform scholarship and pedagogy in the humanities by providing unique community engagement opportunities for the wired undergraduate classroom. As they participate in digital archiving tasks that substantively advance the programming objectives of the TAVP and the APWA, students practice skills that are widely valued across the liberal arts, including identifying and summarizing main ideas, recognizing the contingency of knowledge, and processing and synthesizing multiple divergent perspectives. At the same time, students pioneer new scholarly territory by making strong analytical connections between literary texts and digital archives, thus generating valuable models for innovative digital humanities scholarship.
Twenty-Minute Presentation
2015-04-11T00:00:00ZConsidering Frameworks for the Ideal Digital Research Community: The Past and Present of 18thConnect
http://hdl.handle.net/10106/25725
Considering Frameworks for the Ideal Digital Research Community: The Past and Present of 18thConnect
Grumbach, Liz; Christy, Matthew
The humanities community has strived to develop tools and methods for conducting research and fostering learning in digital spaces, yet scholars are still asking questions about what these spaces should look like. How do we build successful humanities research communities online? How do we aggregate data to provide useful search environments for advanced scholars? How can we meaningfully incorporate digital tools and methodologies into the classroom?
Multiple scholars, organizations, and companies have advanced different answers to these questions. The DPLA provides users with a platform to search aggregated content from many providers. Projects such as MLACommons and 18th-Century Common provide opportunities for subsets of humanities scholars to create a shared space to collaborate and learn together. Innovative projects like Metadata Games, the Smithsonian Transcription project, and PRISM engage undergraduate students in exploring how the digital can illuminate meaning within data, historical documents, and encoding. Proprietary products like Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), as well as scholar-driven digital projects and editions like The Poetess Archive or Romantic Circles seek to digitally collect and share documents on a particular subject or time period.
Yet these projects, tools, and resources are scattered far and wide both digitally and conceptually, making it time-consuming and inefficient for scholars and students seeking to negotiate a balance between digital and traditional means of research and learning. The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), housed at the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) at Texas A&M University, organizes the efforts of several virtual research environments, or nodes. These nodes are period-specific and contain aggregated content from a variety of sources both proprietary and free culture. Additionally, they offer peer review of scholarly digital projects and develop software to explore node-specific issues. While all ARC nodes are committed to providing virtual research environments that locate resources and interdisciplinary interests in one digital space, recent technical and social developments serve to highlight 18thConnect as a model for an ideal online research community.
These recent innovations to 18thConnect provides researchers and students with the means to search, make, play, and collaborate in one virtual research environment. ARC is committed to “meeting scholars where they are” instead of forcing scholars into a predetermined box that assumes certain needs, wants, or technical skills (Author). This same mentality has pushed 18thConnect to seek out diverse means of searching diverse content, methods for students and scholars to engage and play collaboratively, and support for scholars and students dipping their toes into digital humanities and digital methods. However, this is not to say that 18thConnect is a perfect model for the design of scholarly research environments. In this paper, we intend to present both a model for digital research communities and discuss the difficulties inherent in building such a community by looking at the past and present incarnations of 18thConnect’s technical and social infrastructure.
Bibliography
Author. “Article Title.” Scholarly Research and Communication 5.4 (2014): n. pag. Web. 10 Jan 2015.
Twenty-Minute Presentation
2015-04-10T00:00:00Z