Event Title

Soapbox Session C

Presenter Information

Connie Lester, University of Central Florida
Abigail Padfield
Marcy Galbreath, University of Central Florida
Amy Giroux, University of Central Florida
Jessica Taylor
Ashley Sanders
Diane Cline, George Washington University
J.D. Applen

Location

CB1-309

Start Date

4-11-2017 1:45 PM

End Date

4-11-2017 3:00 PM

Description

It's All in the Bag: Developing the BookBag Tool to Organize and Analyze Data and Create Narratives Onsite (Connie Lester)

https://youtu.be/J2_zBgIDFI8

Archival databates are static repositories for housing data. While useful to researchers, they require users to download images, documents and oral histories in order to analyze the data and develop a narrative. The Regional Initiative for Collecting Histories, Experiences, and Stories (RICHES) has developed digital tools to enable users to organize and analyze the data and begin the process of creating an interpretative framework onsite. The BookBag tool is useful for classroom use, for academic research, and to general reading audiences. RICHES is an interdisciplinary, collaborative, academic-public, digital project that was founded in 2010. RICHES is funded through the University of Central Florida College of Arts and Humanities and the Office of Academic Affairs, internal grants, community grants (Florida High Tech Corridor Council and Winter Park Health Foundation) and grants through the National Endowment for the Humanities. RICHES has two goals: 1) to serve as a model for documenting regional history, especially "hidden" history and culture, through an interactive database that draws from multiple repositories and personal collections, and 2) to develop new digital tools for historians. Omeka, is an open source data management software used in over 300 sites (including the Florida State Archives). RICHES MI is a graphical, map-driven interface that overlays the Omeka database and serves as a sensemaking system for historians by accessing co-located collections. a "sensemaking loop". Researchers using RICHES MI follow the "sensemaking loop," described by Pirolli and Card (2005), that models the process researchers use to develop theories and deep understanding of historical periods or events: searching and filtering, saving information found in their search, analyzing their findings and finally exhibiting their narratives. The RICHES team has developed two sensemaking tools: Connections and BookBag. The BookBag tool has been available to users since the RMI site opened in 2012. Initially, registered users could save search items in the BookBag and create a photographic slide show. Additional refinements followed, and in the current iteration, the affordances of the BookBag include: allowing users to annotate individual saved items and organize their historical data into folders according to their research needs; visualizing saved items on a timeline and a map; browsing the Omeka archive from the BookBag view; suggesting new items for their BookBag based on the RICHES Connections algorithm; visualizing comparisons of topics and tags for saved items; and providing StoryBoard space to let users aggregate their thoughts into a narrative or interpretative analysis. Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card, "The Sensemaking Process and Leverage Points for Analyst Technology as Identified Through Cognitive Task Analysis," http://www.phibetaiota.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Sensemaking-Process-Pirolli-and-Card.pdf

Measuring the Impact of History Harvests on UCF and its Community-Based Partner Institutions (Abigail Padfield)

History Harvests are community events, where students and residents, together collect and preserve history. Starting in 2010 at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, History Harvests broaden the historical conversation, from elite to popular, democratizing history by involving community businesses, residents, and scholars. From the personal collections of the community, new histories and conversations arise, opening up the conversation to those that do not usually participate in history. The University of Central Florida brought History Harvests to the Orlando community. Graduate students in Public History classes organized the harvests, getting the community involved and sharing their history. UCF has successfully held three Harvests within the community, with three more, funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, will be completed by June 2017. All are hosted in RICHES. The success of History Harvests at UCF has created questions about their impact. Using the UCF Strategic Plan where Scale+Excellence=Impact, this study considers ways to measure the collective impact of the History Harvests programs in UCF and the surrounding communities. Voluntary interviews were conducted with participants of UCF History Harvests. Each interview lasted between twenty and sixty minutes. The interviews were then coded for description and conceptualization. Interview participants described the History Harvests they participated in and from the interview general categories about History Harvests impacts were created. These categories then informed the qualitative and quantitative data. Initial results show Scale is measurable by numbers including visitors to the RICHES site, artifacts digitized, oral histories completed, classes participating, students receiving internships, and number of partnerships. Excellence is measurable by the student skills learned and the name recognition of UCF and RICHES.

The Paper Lens and Dominant Roots: Exploring the Hegemony of Agricultural Modernization through Historical Agricultural News (Marcy Galbreath and Amy Giroux)

https://youtu.be/-c5YJeNIQuA Digital cultural history can mean different things to different audiences; a community history website, an online museum, or an institutional photo repository all have digital cultural contexts. Our project concerns interpreting data from one such heritage database, Chronicling America, to understand the role newspapers—the social media of the era—played in disseminating hegemonic ideologies within American agricultural communities. Our research uses archival newspapers to trace the role of federal and state governments in shaping perceptions and identities for U.S. farmers. How did late 19th and early 20th century legislative acts challenge and redefine farming and the people who participated in agriculture? The First Morrill Act, Hatch Act, and Smith-Lever Extension Act set the stage for agricultural knowledge to become a formalized sphere for technical and scientific inquiry in the United States during the advent of modern farming. Agriculture at the time was an area open to change through reorganization, systemization, and science-based principles of production. It was hoped that, just as these ideas had transformed the U.S. manufacturing economy, they would similarly reshape agricultural processes. Implicit in this drive for modernity is the notion that farmers, in their native practices, would be inadequate for the needs of an industrialized America; farmers, for their part, embraced the new technologies and the concept of a business-model agriculture. Finding the newspapers that contain traces of these acts through Chronicling America is possible but difficult due to the immense amount of information. Currently, the database contains 11,764,536 pages, and is continually growing as more collections are added. Our response to the challenges and opportunities of big data, a topic-specific search tool website we title Historical Agricultural News (HAN), makes the Chronicling America database more accessible and offers downloadable data sets and visualizations. To rhetoricians, written genres such as legislative acts (and the newspapers that report them) participate in social action, reflecting power relationships and directing community perceptions. In this paper, we argue that legislative acts, visible through the lens of archival newspapers, demonstrate a hegemonic reshaping of farming identities by establishing discourses of education, improvement, and industry. HAN enables article-level text analysis of newspapers from the time period, reveals the presence and activity of these genres, and produces visualizations to trace the expansion of progressive ideologies.

Mapping property boundaries and Indian trails in the Chesapeake (Jessica Taylor)

In response to the indigenous cultures and digital humanities and identity themes for HASTAC 2017, I propose a short soapbox presentation about uncovering indigenous landscapes and movements via English property records, maps, and Google Earth. Historians have referred to "Great Warrior Paths" or "Indian trails" in the abstract, when in fact for the English colonists they provided concrete points of reference on plat maps and in property descriptions. The mention that "the Nanzaticoe path" bounded John Aston's Virginia estate means little without context, but taken alongside his contemporary neighbors' boundaries, we can determine orientation and connections between roadways that facilitated everyday communication. Who accessed these paths, and how? What might have been its primary destination, and how did its purpose change over time? Did the new "King's Road" and the old "Nanzaticoe path" ever intersect? A more exact reconstruction of these paths not only reveals geographic patterns and overlaps in early Indian and English movements, but to provide a methodological breakthrough useful to historians and archaeologists who could then, for their own research purposes, thoroughly reexamine areas mapped by colonial surveyors. Further, historians and history buffs alike often visualize Anglo-Indian interactions through maps depicting encroaching English settlement on Indian homelands. GIS can demonstrate that Indians continued to live along landscapes familiar to them in "colonized areas," offering visually powerful evidence that locally, these borders meant little. Indians may not have shared our reverence for property boundaries but they certainly valued and defended as sacred the sovereign borders of their domains. Thus, plotting property boundaries—ironically, symbols of legal dispossession—will bring us closer to understanding the English-occupied Chesapeake from an Indian perspective.

Surfacing Indigenous Perspectives on the French Conquest of Algeria in a Graduate DH Course (Ashley Sanders)

In response to a scandal involving a fly swatter, as well as local social and political turmoil, France invaded Algeria in 1830 and eventually colonized the former Ottoman territory. The history of France's 132-year occupation of Algeria is fraught and complicated, and most studies approach it from a single perspective – that of the conquering French, while scholars often struggle to access non-French primary and secondary sources. This presentation showcases the many possibilities that DH offers to de-center and decolonize the historical narrative by demonstrating how graduate students used text analysis and network visualization to uncover and share the complexity of Algerians' identities, roles in society, and diplomatic relationships between 1830 and 1847. Algeria was a complicated, heterogeneous world in the mid-nineteenth century, but much of that complexity is lost in colonial record. As part of the reclamation of this history, it is important to provide both students and scholars the chance to interact with Indigenous sources. Through the memoir of Ahmed Bey, Algerian governor and resistance leader, students learned both close and distant reading techniques, as well as how to structure unstructured data and use social network analysis to better understand his world. By integrating the aforementioned methods, the students developed greater empathy for Ahmed Bey and the Algerians, as well as a deeper understanding of the intricate web of relationships, motivations, and evolving alliances during the French conquest. By organizing information about the actors that Ahmed Bey described, as well as their religion, place of origin, ethnic identities, allegiances, and actions, the students began to understand the socio-political landscape and how it shifted over time in response to the incursion of the French. Through careful analysis of Ahmed Bey's social network, they grappled with the complicated choices that Algerians faced as they sought to flee, resist, manipulate, or negotiate with the French. As students experimented with network visualizations in Palladio and analyzed the memoir with Voyant Tools, they shared their questions and conclusions on their individual websites. Making their findings openly available and accessible increases the academic material available in English on the French colonization of Algeria. What is more, their digital scholarship surfaces Indigenous perspectives and voices, and continues the important work of repositioning Indigenous people at the center of this historical narrative. These projects reveal how DH research methods can enable students to develop a nuanced understanding of Indigenous cultures and make meaningful contributions to the scholarly conversation.

The JFK Assassination Records Act of 1992 and Digital History (Diane Cline)

https://youtu.be/AmDwzoGPMZM My course at George Washington University is called Digital History, and it introduces undergraduate students to new technologies and practices that professionals inside and outside of academia use to preserve, provide access to, analyze, and exhibit primary sources for history. I take students on a journey from Digitization, through Discovery, to Design, and Dissemination (building an Omeka exhibit). This year's theme really engaged the students, and was also timely. The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Act of 1992 specified that 25 years from the day it was signed, all documents pertaining to it in government hands must be turned over to NARA and made available to the public (except for documents which the president himself withholds on national security grounds). That 25-year window closed on October 26, 2017. Through NARA's citizen-archivist program, each student got an FBI folder for a key person of interest. They transcribed their folder to help NARA make their October 26, 2017 deadline, and felt they were contributing to the country's history in doing the project. We had guest speakers who are practitioners in the digital humanities, including archivists, librarians, digital project managers, and internal historians in institutions like the Ford's Theatre, Smithsonian Museums, and National Archives. The end product is an Omeka digital historical exhibit on witnessing the assassination. On the last day of class, being in Washington DC, we took the metro to Arlington Cemetery to see JFK's final resting place. This is the third year I have taught the class, but the first using this theme.

Big Data, Digital Humanities, and a New Understanding of Predictive Analytics (J.D. Applen)

Drucker and Svensson write that "digital humanists need to push critical issues into the implementation" of technologies, and that "data structures remain a rather unfamiliar area of compositional competence for most humanists" (2). In their book Big Data, Mayer-Schonberger and Cukiar describe that big data is more than an analysis of a large amount of datapoints; it is about throwing many datasets together and seeing if they show any predictive correlations, regardless of the logic behind the connections. For example, data acquired from seemingly "unstructured" phenonema was acquired from airline web sites to be able to predict when ticket prices would go up or down in the near future, thus enabling patrons to better time their purchases. In the past, this general method has been disparaged as mere "fishing expeditions" and thus unscientific, but today, the useful results yielded from these methods, coupled with a recent and dramatic increases in available data in digital environments and the relatively inexpensive technologies that are now available for processing them, have changed this view for many. One scholar in technical communication describes the work of Mayer-Schonberger and Cukiar as one that "elide[s] the layers of interpretation and communication" (Frith 2017) from big data projects and thus undermines the value of technical communicators, but I believe their position has been misrepresented. A deeper epistemological foundation is at work here and we have to begin imagining that if there are correlations that we do not initially understand, but are predictive, we should use them. We can also suggest and perform more traditional research that discovers just what are the actual mechanisms behind the connections and how to present these data so we can begin our analyses. As digital humanists, we have to come to terms with the idea that we cannot always use traditional cause and effect narratives to describe how and why big data results and representations are of value. Bolter writes that each new medium provides "a new strategy" that achieves an "authentic experience" for users (45), and we should be able to identify the changes in the visual and rhetorical representations of big data and their affect on the authenticity of these texts, whether it is in industry or the humanities. A long-standing concept in our field is that technical communicators need to be "symbolic analysts" (Johnson-Eilola 245-6), and understanding the symbolic nature of information encoding used in the digital humanities requires "new work habits, new training, new tools, new practices, and new instincts" (Kirschenbaum and Reside 272). I will illustrate in my presentation that there are past examples for the kinds of analyses suggested by today's big data advocates, and many of them are in medicine. For example, narratives based on World Health Organization records have described how one type of drug or treatment that is used to treat one disease also benefits a patient with another affliction, and while there are no biochemical explanations at hand to explain this, medicines have been prescribed to treat "secondary" ailments.