DSS contributes to developer community at HydraConnect 2015

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Emily McGinn

Lafayette’s Digital Scholarship Services is once again in the forefront of library repository development. At this year’s HydraConnect Conference, DSS developer James Griffin shared his work with the burgeoning community of Hydra developers.

Hydra is an Open Source software that, together with the repository system Fedora, forms the basis of many institutional repositories and is the foundation for preservation and discovery for many digital archives. Griffin is part of a working group looking to expand the uses of Hydra to include the preservation and display of GIS data within library repository systems. While this kind of work is largely invisible to the casual user, it can make a lasting impact on future development.

DSS Developer James Griffin presenting on Geospatial Data in Hydra

In designing the architecture of this new functionality, Griffin finds himself in excellent company working with a handful of other like-minded developers from Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Alberta, who form the GIS Data Modeling Working Group. The conference provided the occasion for the group to present their initial data models. In these initial stages, the group has begun to break down the complex data components of GIS files into a structure compatible with the repository’s internal organization and consistent with existing data models for other types of information.

The group participated in a poster session and also sponsored an “unconference” session, a free form discussion whose topics are determined by the conference goers. In addition, Griffin presented a lightning talk on their data model. “Our presentations have generated a lot of interest in how we have addressed our use cases using linked open data in the Resource Description Framework,” explains Griffin. “While few are working on GIS related projects our project gives weight to the idea that Hydra is flexible and versatile. It’s more than just a repository solution.” This work, now cutting edge, will help to guide future development in Hydra and expand its potential applications in digital library infrastructure.

Through Griffin’s work, Lafayette is an increasingly important player in this arena and the working group will present their latest developments next month at the Digital Library Federation conference in Vancouver, and at the Geo4LibCamp at Stanford University in January.

Putting the Teacher-Scholar Ideal into Practice: A Liberal Arts College Model for Digital Humanities

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Emily McGinn

Neil Fraistat, Alison Byerly and Paul Barclay

On October 1, President Byerly joined Professor Neil Fraistat, Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and Professor Paul Barclay (History, Asian Studies) for a public conversation about Digital Humanities, and more specifically, how DH fits into the liberal arts. The event was sponsored by Skillman Library and the Digital Humanities Steering Committee and is part of an ongoing initiative to enrich digital scholarship on campus.

With the benefit of a $700,000, four-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Steering Committee has launched a number of new initiatives on campus, including the DH Summer Scholars internship and DH in the Classroom program. These initiatives are in addition to their continued support of large-scale faculty research projects. The broad spectrum of these programs reveals the Committee’s goals of creating a holistic approach to Digital Scholarship that fosters collaboration across disciplines through project-based learning. In addition, these programs work to build a reciprocal relationship between teaching and research in which digital methods open new research questions while transforming the nature of engagement with humanistic objects of study for both students and faculty.

Alison Byerly and Neil Fraistat

Professor Fraistat joined us to discuss the future of these initiatives as we work to strengthen digital engagement with research and the curriculum. The event prompted an energizing conversation that elucidated the shared goals of the college, the steering committee, and the field of Digital Humanities.

We have included here the full transcript of Professor Barclay’s opening remarks and we look forward to continuing this conversation with the Lafayette community.

Continue reading →

GIS Workshop: Exploring Google Maps

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Emily McGinn

There is a lot more to Google Maps than meets the eye. Join John Clark, DSS’ Data Visualization & GIS Librarian, for a glimpse of what goes on “under the hood” of this online mapping resource and how you can use it to make your own customized maps. Participants will learn how to contribute their own content to a Google Map as well as many other tips and tricks for creating useful and well designed maps with nothing more than a web browser. Windows laptops will be provided for all participants, but feel free to bring your own.

This workshop will be held twice, first on October 16 and then repeated on October 21.

Friday, October 16	12:15 pm to 1:00pm Skillman 003
Wednesday, October 21	12:15 pm to 1:00pm Skillman 004

Lunch provided. Please RSVP John Clark (clarkjh@lafayette.edu), indicating the date you would like to attend.

DHLaf Lunch Series Kicks off with Student Presentations

Posted on September 25, 2015 by Emily McGinn

Ian Morse describing his research

Fifteen students and six faculty and administration members of the DH Mellon Steering Committee gathered for presentations of digital humanities research projects on September 23, 2015, in Kirby 107 as the first of the monthly DH Lunch series of the year. The research grew out of the Digital Humanities Summer Scholars Program funded by the Steering Committee and launched in the summer of 2015. Mellon Foundation Fellow Emily McGinn coordinated the summer research program, and facilitated discussion at today’s event. First up were Vincent DeMarco and Benjamin Draves. Their project, Tempo of the Times, began with a family conversation about depression-era films and how popular arts reflect their historical contexts. To extend this inquiry into the realm of popular music, DeMarco and Draves searched for existing databases of music and ways to break songs down into measurable components. They located several massive datasets, adapted the variables and quantifiers to their own questions, and then went to work. Their current site, as they explained with interactive graphs, presents correlations of economic indicators such as GDP, political indicators such as levels of military spending, with musical variables such as “acousticness” or “loudness” to determine which types of music thrive under what types of epochs.

Ian Morse gave the second presentation. His project is the Solution Based Press Freedom Project. Ian recently studied abroad in Turkey, and his project is an attempt to use a corpus-based methodology to analyze the content of Turkish journalism. Morse mentioned that many global press-freedom indexes fail to control for such variables such as national development, and pay insufficient attention to the quality and tone of reporting as it is affected by political upheavals. Morse has been converting newspaper data to machine readable text, and then using a variety of digital humanities tools find patterns in the data. One of Morse’s next moves is to present his data and preliminary findings to experts on Turkish politics and journalism at a conference at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference “Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Public Scholarship” in November of this year. DeMarco and Draves will also be on the program, as well as other DH summer fellows Feevan Megersa and EXCEL student Jethro Israel.

Dean of Libraries Neil McElroy, Professors Wendy Wilson-Fall (Africana Studies), Tim Laquintano (English), Ben Cohen (Engineering Studies), Paul Barclay (History), and Jessica Carr (Religious Studies), as well as Research Librarian Sarah Morris, were also in attendance to ask questions and participate in the discussion.

The next DHLaf Lunch will be on October 29th in Skillman 003 from 12-1 and will feature a discussion of History Professor Paul Barclay’s recent work in connecting his East Asia Image Collection with a complementary collection at Kyoto University in Japan.

GIS Workshop: A Very Brief Introduction to Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

Posted on September 9, 2015 by Emily McGinn

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are a powerful, yet easily accessible technology, used for analyzing and mapping information about the world around us.

In this workshop participants will be given an introduction to basic geographic and information science concepts followed by a demonstration of ArcGIS, a popular desktop GIS application available to the Lafayette community at Skillman Library.

A second, optional workshop (Part 2), will be available the following week and will offer hands-on training using WorldMap, a simple, intuitive and free on-line GIS application. You may take the first workshop as a complete, albeit brief, introduction to GIS or you may sign up for the series of two.

Part I: Introduction	Weds. Sept. 23
Part II: Workshop (optional)	Weds. Sept. 30

Both workshops will take place in Skillman 003 from 12:15pm to 1:00pm. 18 seats available. Lunch provided.

Please RSVP John Clark clarkjh@lafayette.com and indicate if you would like to take one or both workshops and which dates you would like to attend.

Summer Scholars Program Introduces Students to DH

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Emily McGinn

This summer Skillman Library launched Lafayette’s first undergraduate digital humanities internship program. The Digital Humanities Summer Scholars program, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and supported by the Library’s Digital Scholarship Services, offered an internship opportunity for seven students to work on a digital research project of their own design.

The program offered students the space, the time, and the resources to become content creators in their own right. Our call for proposals tapped into the creative energy of the Lafayette student body and yielded proposals that demonstrated exactly the type of inquiry and ingenuity we were hoping for. These seven students were selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants, and represent disciplines from across Lafayette’s academic community:

Ahmed Malik Braxton – Government and Law
Vincent DeMarco – Mathematics
Benjamin Draves – Mathematics
Feevan Megersa – Liberal Arts
Ian Morse – History; Math
Peter Todaro – Government and Law
Miranda Wilcha – Environmental Studies; Anthropology

The six-week course was structured as a workshop during which the students would meet as a group under the instruction of Emily McGinn, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at Skillman Library. In the group setting each would present updates on their work, ask for feedback, and troubleshoot any obstacles they might have encountered. Together this group functioned as a microcosm of all digital projects, tackling questions of copyright, access, and authorship in addition to confronting the difficult task of data collection and cleaning.

Most important, the workshop served as a model for project management. Our summer interns deconstructed their proposals and sharpened them into accomplishable tasks and focused hypotheses. In taking the time to define a realistic scope for the project early on, they were able to identify the tools, the resources, and the technical skill they would need to accomplish their goals. Though many digital humanities projects are large scale, long-term projects that take years to build with teams of developers and researchers, our students were able to scope and build smaller scale, yet complex, well-structured projects in a few short weeks.

Each student had their own goals in mind for their project. For some, it will serve as the basis for a senior thesis, for others a sample for a grad school application, or publication. Feevan Megersa and Ian Morse will be joined by EXCEL scholar Jethro Israel to discuss their work as student researchers and project developers at Bucknell’s Digital Humanities Conference this fall. Ian will also present his work as a part of the NextGen Plenary session highlighting student projects and Vincent DeMarco and Ben Draves will be presenting their project during the poster session at the conference.

Lafayette’s is working to provide additional opportunities for undergraduate engagement both on campus and in the wider digital humanities community. As we continue to build the DH community at Lafayette, student engagement is and will continue to be a vital part of our initiative. We strive to cultivate the intellectual curiosity and autonomy our students showed us this summer and look forward to seeing where they go next.

For more information about this program visit sites.lafayette.edu/dhss.

Our Projects

Tempo of the Times
The aim of this project is to discover connections between music and society. Artists set out to create music that entertains, but also seek to create art that represents the times in which they live. This project examines the way in which societal changes shift musical composition. – Vincent DeMarco and Benjamin Draves

Got Folktales?
This project aims to capture Ethiopian folktales and to map reoccurring themes as well as highlight the moral behind each folktale. In order to accurately represent the diverse ethnicities found within the country we have selected five stories from each of the 13 regions within the country- Feevan Megersa

Solution Based Press Freedom Project
Current press freedom indices conflate myriad problems and measures into single values. When searching for solutions to press freedom violations, believing that all countries suffer from similar afflictions is counterproductive. The crux of this project has focused on establishing a method of measuring how we can use digital humanities to see how newspapers react to external events in answering the question “How does press freedom affect the ‘quality’ of journalism?” – Ian Morse

Gentrification and Barry Farms
This project analyzes the economic and social situations of many people experiencing gentrification specifically in Washington D.C. Gentrification will not only have a detrimental impact on the citizens of Barry Farms, but will also be deleterious to the entire city of Washington DC. – Ahmed Braxton

Garden of Easton
The Garden of Easton seeks to aggregate the relevant information to connect local residents to food, whether that be a community garden, a CSA pickup location, a homeless shelter, or a meal center. We do so by providing an all-encompassing Android App, a web-based map, and a plain text list of the food providers and producers in our community so that residents have an easily accessible site to find resources they need. – Miranda Wilcha and Peter Todaro

GIS Workshop: Beware of Maps – a beginner’s guide to reading and making maps

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Emily McGinn

Reading a map is trickier than you might expect. While maps casually present themselves as a visualization of reality, the truth is, they aren’t. All maps are imperfect models of natural and cultural features on the surface of the Earth. Reading a map involves understanding how a map maker has chosen to represent these features and, perhaps more importantly, what s(he) has left out. Join Data Visualization & GIS Librarian John Clark for a guided tour through a variety of different historical and contemporary maps as he explains some common principals used by cartographers. Participants will then have an opportunity to make a map themselves using Social Explorer, an on-line mapping tool available to the Lafayette community through Skillman Library.

There are two sessions available:

Wednesday September 16^th

Skillman 003

Friday September 18^th

Skillman 004

Lunch provided.18 seats available for each session. Please RSVP and indicate if you would like to attend the Wednesday or Friday event to John Clark at clarkjh@lafayette.com.

DH in the Classroom Projects and New Call for Proposals

Posted on May 23, 2015 by Emily McGinn

This semester saw the successful launch of the Digital Humanities in the Classroom initiative sponsored by Skillman Library and the Mellon Digital Humanities Steering Committee. Grant recipients were asked to convert an assignment or project in their class to one based in the digital humanities. Rather than adding technology for the delivery of content, the grant asks for instructors to use digital methods and technologies to ask new research questions and engage with materials in a new way.

If you’re interested in adding a digital component to your class for next year, we are currently accepting applications for next semester. See our Call for Proposals for the full details.

Example of REL 308 final project

The call for proposals brought in professors from five different departments ranging from Mathematics to English, each engaging with the tenets of DH from a unique perspective. This week we have had the opportunity to see the results of this initiative as the students turn in their final projects.

Omeka,a digital platform for image collection and image building supported by Skillman Library’s Digital Scholarship Services was primary tool for several of the DH in the Classroom participants. Omeka was ideally suited for Professor Jessica Carr’s Religious Studies class that examined religious imagery and power in religious discourse. For their final projects, students were asked to curate a digital exhibit of images and discuss the significance of their groupings. Building the collection highlighted the influence of curation on the interpretation of images and helped the students to articulate their own perspectives on their objects of study.

Petrology final project on Omeka

Professor Tamara Carley used Omeka in her Geology class in two ways. First her students learned to catalogue and record metadata for their mineral samples. Recording the details of the samples helped them tell the story of the sample and track its movement over time. At the end of the semester, each of her students created final presentations that required using the data collected by the class as whole as evidence for their hypotheses. The Omeka collection became a repository for the class’ knowledge that could then be utilized to build new arguments.

Interactive timeline and map from the McDonogh Project

Africana Studies Professor Wendy Wilson-Fall organized data collected in two previous classes to create a new digital exhibition that follows the story of the McDonogh “Brothers” two manumitted slaves that attended Lafayette in the 19th century. Her classes read collections of letters and cultural materials with the assistance of Diane Shaw in Special Collections. This term’s class was able to organize that information previously collected to begin to untangle the social world of both David and Washington McDonogh. The students gained skills in both the collection and visualization of data.

In Professor Chris Phillip’s English class, the digital display of the students work came not in an exhibit, but in a digital publication. Students created their own anthology of Civil War poetry that they compiled as a collaborative ePub. According to Professor Phillips, the process of bringing images, text, and annotations together opened new avenues for analysis for students. “They realized that they could find patterns in the literature they hadn’t anticipated,” he says. “They found new potentials and problems in sharing their work with others, and they realized that there actually is a workflow to producing an e-book—it’s not quite something anyone can do, but with the right tools and a bit of support, they can turn their research into a publication.” The project helped the students to gain authority over their work and gained skills that will transfer to other courses across the curriculum.

Cover image from ENG 212’s anthology project

In Professor Trent Gaugler’s Mathematical Statistics class, students applied their quantitative skills to a humanities based data set. The class analyzed a set of 775 writing samples from incoming and returning Writing Associates collected between 1995 and 2012. They used the statistical methods they learned in class to compare the essays over time. The project asked students not only to master the learning objectives of the course in order to run the analysis but also how to think about qualitative data in a quantitative manner, breaking down larger questions like, are the essays written in 1995 more sophisticated than those in 2012 into measurable, testable hypotheses.

Analysis of comma use in new Writing Associate essays over time.

For example, this graph tracks comma usage in the essays collected from new Writing Associates over time and separated by gender. These students were measuring the sophistication of the writing samples by testing the hypothesis that more commas per sentence would indicate more complex sentences and therefore more sophisticated writing. Interestingly, through a wide range of analyses and hypotheses that the class conducted, their data showed that over the course of nearly 20 years, the writing samples remained remarkably consistent.

Each of these classes found a unique way to engage with the methods and tools of the digital humanities. For more information about these projects or about developing your own classroom project contact Emily McGinn, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, mcginne@lafayette.edu, or see our Call for Proposals for the full details.

“Mapping Memories” Book Release Celebrates Easton History

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Emily McGinn

Students Julianna Vuotto ’17, Marcus Vilme ’17, Kamani Christian ’17, and Dawit Blackwell ’17 check out the latest edition of “Remembering the Taylor School and 4th and Lehigh Neighborhood.”

Professor Andrea Smith’s “Rebuilding Shattered Worlds through Recollection” (A&S 244) class gave a special presentation of their final project at the Sigal Museum. This semester, the class contributed to the ongoing digital public history project “Lebanese Town,” and have been busy interviewing local residents and collecting photographs and memorabilia from former residents of Easton’s Lebanese neighborhood that was lost to urban renewal in the 1960s. The students were able to share their work with the contributors in a collected edition of their stories.

Julie Vuotto ’17 presents her chapter

The book is a compilation of research conducted across several years and two semesters of student research. This year’s class was able to draw on the previous class’s research to create multi-faceted chapters and to expand the earlier research. Their additions include a chapter on the Italian-American residents, additional sections to chapters on the African-American experience, childhood, and a chapter on home remedies and cures handed down from the old world, and the class’ favorite new chapter, “Consumption in Yesteryear” that brings together all of the stories of the specialty food like the local lemon ice and boiled peanuts and the various ‘mom and pop shops’ that populated the neighborhood. These are the moments in the interviews where the residents’ memories are clear and marked by a joyous nostalgia for their childhood.

Easton resident and project contributor Sonja Shaheen

This enthusiastic nostalgia was evident in yesterday’s presentation. As each image appeared on the screen, the audience delighted in seeing their own photos included in the project. Every image sparked a renewed discussion of the content, with each person reconstructing the story told in the photo from their memories. All of the contributors got to take home a copy of the book signed by the student authors.

The book is the first stage of the larger Lebanese Town digital project. Since many of the residents are now in their 70s and 80s, they felt that a book would be a better medium for sharing this work with their families. The larger digital project is currently under development with Digital Scholarship Services. Professor Smith has been working closely with DSS’ Visual Resources Curator Paul Miller to collect, scan, and catalogue all of the materials the students have collected. These photos and stories will then be pinned to the digitized map of Easton from 1919 before this section of town was razed, to create a holistic view of the neighborhood. To learn more about the project visit our previous post.

1919 map of Lebanese Town

For the students this process has been a unique experience, one that made them feel closer to their new home in Easton and that has fostered great relationships between the students and the residents. “I’ve never worked on a project like this,” says Marcus Vilme ’17. “It’s a great feeling to know that my work is now part of something bigger than my class. Unlike a term paper that will get read maybe once or twice, this project has contributed to something that the whole community benefits from.” The residents’ excitement in seeing their own stories preserved and their appreciation for the students’ hard work was a better reward than any grade.

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu, or call (610) 330-5796.

Lafayette participates in Keystone DH Transcribathon

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Emily McGinn

As part of the Keystone Digital Humanities consortium, Skillman Library’s Digital Scholarship Services participated in a virtual transcribathon along with nine other colleges and universities from the area including Muhlenberg, Lehigh, Bucknell, and University of Pennsylvania. With a great turnout of 10 contributors over the course of the event including five undergraduates and several librarians, the team was able to transcribe 125 new records, all while building a community of DH practitioners on campus and connecting with our colleagues across the state.

Transcribathon participants working on ELC pages

Our group chose to transcribe ledger records from our Easton Library Company project. On hand for the event were Professor Chris Phillips, the primary researcher on the ELC project, Diane Shaw from Lafayette’s Special Collections, and a number of undergraduate students interested in working on digital humanities projects. The ledgers contain the loan records from the Easton Library in the early 1800s. The goal of transcribing these ledgers is to gain insight into the reading practices of 19th century readers and to learn more about Easton’s local history. (To learn more about the project read our previous post on the ELC.)

As the students would find out, transcribing the pages involved not simply transferring the handwritten records into type, but also required lessons in 19th century librarian short hand, research into complex book titles, and a bit of forensic investigation. After the first few successful entries, it was easy to get lost in the world of early Easton, finding names of residents that now appear on street signs and building, and discovering long forgotten novels. Correctly deciphering an entry started to bring out the competitive spirit in the participants and by the end of the night everyone had fun engaging in some biblio detective work.

Example of a ledger page from 1823

The event lasted three hours with similar transcription efforts happening simultaneously across all of the the participating campuses connected via Google Hangout. The Keystone DH group designed this initiative based on a transcribathon event at the Folger Shakespeare Library in December. The Folger event lasted for 12 hours with 35 participants transcribing and encoding manuscript pages for inclusion in the Early Modern Manuscripts Online project. This event, though shorter in duration, was an experiment in fostering a broader community and connecting like-minded scholars and researchers all of whom are working on long term digital humanities projects.

Sample ledger facsimile, relational data table, and network graph visualization.

The data collected at the event will be added to the ELC’s quickly expanding relational database and the Transcribathon also gave us the opportunity to test a new data entry interface that Digital Scholarship Services has created. Working closely with the students engaged on the project, DSS developers James Griffin and Thom Goodnow have built forms designed to the specific needs of the ELC and the feedback from the Transcribathon will be used to refine these tools even further. Once complete, this project will allow users to investigate and visualize this data on their own and discover new relationships between readers, lenders, and the community. For us the feedback, as well as the data recorded, are invaluable in advancing the project and we look forward to more opportunities to collaborate with the Keystone community in the future.

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu , or call (610) 330-5796.

DSS Blog

News and events from Skillman Library's Digital Scholarship Services