CTDH Conference

Frontiers in Historical GIS, the GeoHumanities, and Narrative Visualization: Presentations by Anne Kelly Knowles (U of Maine) and LaDale Winling (Virginia Tech). Cosponsored by UConn, Capital Community College, and Trinity College, this event takes place at the Liberal Arts Action Lab. Though not formally part of the CTDH program, conference attendees are welcome at this related event!

Breakfast will be available from 8-8:45 am. 

The registration desk will open at 8 am at the front of the Library. (LATE EDIT: It is available on Level 2 outside the 1823 Room. Apologies.) After 10:30 am, it will be available on Level 2. 

Mark LeBlanc and Kate Boylan, "Lexos: an introductory tool for a new "close reading"
As the Digital Humanities gains access to a wide array of digitized corpora and matures to a discipline that creatively defines new methods for computationally close and distant readings, a growing gap has emerged between those who apply sophisticated programming and those who are new to the game and need an introduction to the field.  Our open-source Lexos tools (lexos.wheatoncollege.edu) narrow the gap by providing an easy to use web-based interface that introduces scholars to a computational lens for close reading digitized texts in any language. Based on NEH-funded work over the last decade, a team of undergraduate programmers and humanities students and scholars have designed an interface that guides users through a workflow that highlights effective practices when conducting computational probes of digitized texts, including the steps of scrubbing (e.g., deciding how to deal with punctuation, special characters, <tags>, lemmatization, and stop words), cutting texts into segments, tokenization (counting word and character n-grams), introductory statistical analyses (e.g., clustering), and visualizations of results (e.g., plotting words or phrases of interest across an entire novel). At CTDH '20 we propose to engage audience members with a set of examples that instill confidence with using the tool as well as generate ideas for a wide variety of potential uses in languages from Old English to Mandarin in order to empower humanities scholars to ask new sets of questions of their digitized texts.

Chair: Cait Kennedy

Brian Matzke, "“Computers aren’t my thing”: Teaching an Introductory DH Course at a Small University"
This paper will describe a newly created course, “DH100: Introduction to Digital Humanities,” that was taught at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) for the first time in the Fall of 2019. The course was designed to provide a broad overview of the field, serve as a gateway to upper level DH courses in English and History, and fulfill a general education requirement in the arts and humanities.
In the course, students created websites using WordPress and designed multi-media research projects using digital tools. Students found primary sources online and create exhibits of those sources on their sites. They wrote metadata records to describe their sources and marked up documents in XML. They extracted data from their sources, such as word frequencies using programs like Voyant, and visualized that data in the form of graphs or word clouds. Students also created maps and timelines and exhibited these visualizations on their websites as well. Finally, they wrote short research papers describing their findings.
This paper will examine some of the difficulties involved in guiding students through their research projects and introducing them to a wide range of DH tools and concepts. This being a 100-level class, most of the students were in their first semester of college and had no prior experience with original research. Additionally, about half of the students were in Computer Science-related majors and came to the course with a relatively high degree of technological literacy, while the other half had little confidence working with computers. Designing instruction that effectively balanced an introduction to research methods with appropriate coverage of technical competencies, while also encouraging humanistic critique, proves to be an ongoing challenge. This paper will also discuss the challenges of reaching out to women, first generation college students, and other underrepresented groups.

Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury, "History and (Digital) Writing: A Report from the Classroom"
Over the last 5-6 years I have integrated my interest in digital humanities into my undergraduate history teaching. This paper outlines my experiments with different digital tools in the history classroom and their impact on student learning. I discuss different platforms suitable for undergraduate history courses and discuss the potential usefulness of digital tools for history writing and classroom discussion. The disciplinary issues specific to history that I raise in this paper are: design (framing history projects suitable for digital tools), selection (choosing platforms suitable for history projects) and student engagement (my experiences). The paper will be of great interest to historians and librarians as we all work together to educate students to write for public-facing digital platforms and to engage in critical thinking in a digital age.

Jenna Sheffield, Cara Miele, Lauren Boasso, Mary Isbell, Lauren Beck, Simon Hutchinson, and Matt Wranovix, "Calling All Majors: The Digital Humanities Lab at the University of New Haven"
This fall, faculty across different disciplines at the University of New Haven have come together to teach a new 1-credit, introductory “Digital Humanities Lab” designed to introduce students to the possibilities for undergraduate research in the digital humanities. Our version of the digital humanities is all-inclusive and focused on getting students excited about faculty-mentored research early in their undergrad careers.

Our goal is to attract students and faculty from all majors, enhancing projects in any discipline. A student pursuing criminal justice could prepare a digital archive of important documents from a historic court case for future students, perhaps partnering with a forensic science student to create an interactive map of crime scene data. A philosophy student might generate a thought experiment using a Twitterbot. And a student of literature might track major changes in a story over 500 years, customizing an interface that allows readers to explore adaptations in detail.

During the first half of the course, faculty from different disciplines introduce how their expertise intersects with the digital humanities and might enhance or shape student projects. Students can participate in-person or virtually for the first half of the course and then meet individually with the faculty member of their choice to build a project in the second half of the semester.

In this panel we will discuss the creation and implementation of our DH lab, speak about some of the challenges we encountered, and share student projects and their impact. Mary Isbell, the first lead on the course, will share the specific strategies employed for course design and recruitment, and the other panelists will discuss insights that emerged from their preparation of 75-minute workshops and individual mentoring.

Chair: Francesca Baird

Di Luo, "Photogrammetric Modeling in Surveying and Teaching Chinese Architecture"
The presentation I propose is half demonstration and half traditional (slide-show) presentation. The first ten minutes demonstrate the basics of 3D photogrammetric modeling using Autodesk ReCap Photo. I will showcase the workflow of generating a 3D digital architectural model, from taking photographs to the cropping and editing of the raw model, then to the publication of the refined model on the Internet. This is to demystify the techniques of photogrammetry. For the next ten minutes, I will share my thoughts on several broader issues related to photogrammetry: how it can be used in fieldwork to assist general surveys of buildings and what impacts it has made on the study, the preservation, and the teaching and learning of architecture. For my research on miniature and small-scale architecture in China, photogrammetry proves an invaluable tool to document the meticulous detail of the architectural interior. It complements traditional survey methods especially in cases where complex ceiling structures and ornate decorations render conventional measuring tools inefficient or inept. The ceiling of the Jingtusi monastery (1124 CE) is the major example of my current research on the wooden domes of Chinese architecture. Photogrammetry not only provides a 360 degree view of the ceiling but has further generated orthographic drawings for quantitative analyses of the scale and the structure. My presentation further showcases four more wooden domes I have surveyed using photogrammetry. The 3D models map out the visibility of the various parts of the ceilings and help to understand the purpose of image-making in Chinese domes. The digital “other life” or “afterlife” of the ceilings raises the issues of authenticity and replication, of the loss of the “aura” and the distortion of the scale, adding to the ongoing debates on the role of digital art. The presentation will include a few student-made models and reflect on how photogrammetry can be adopted in classrooms to enhance teaching and learning.

Sarah Oberbichler, Manfred Moosleitner, and Mag. Katharina Gallner-Holzmann, "DigiVis: Ways of analyzing and visualizing the digital estate of Ernst von Glasersfeld"
The extensive estate of the philosopher, communication scientist and father of radical constructivism, Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010), has been available to the public at the Brenner Archive in Innsbruck (Austria) since 2013. A large part of the archive has already been digitised and since 2018, an interdisciplinary project team (computer scientists and humanities researchers) from the University of Innsbruck has been working on the analysis and visualization of the archive. In addition to network analyses, digital storytelling approaches and didactic processing, the visualization of argumentation structures in the scientific legacy is one of the main goals. For the analysis, established extensions such as Semantic MediaWiki or Semantic Text Annotator are used, as well as user-defined MediaWiki extensions to add tools for corpus-linguistic text analysis and natural language processing tasks (e.g. frequency analysis, topic modeling, co-occurence analysis and named entities recognition). Manual analyses and the interaction of manual and computer-aided analyses also play an important role. For the visualization, the team is working together closely with a specialist in data visualization. A further goal of the DigiVis project is to use the design principles of “generous interfaces” (Mitchell Whitelaw, 2015) to create a user-friendly and easily accessible interface for users with various backgrounds, ranging from students to experts. The talk shows the current state of the project (started October 2018), gives an outline of planned features, presents how our findings can be generalized and used for any digital archiving and preservation platform, and shows how MediaWiki is utilized as the core of the project.

Iris Bork-Goldfield and Jesse Simmons, "Genealogical Digital Story Telling: An Exploration"
Albert Alexander: In Transit to Success is the story of my great-great-grandfather who—like some German Jews—arrived on the shores of New York in the mid-nineteenth century only to return to the German Empire shortly after its founding in 1871. Albert was always on the move, from city to city, country to country, and street to street in both Germany and New York City. Therefore, maps were needed to tell this part of his story. For the past year, I have been experimenting with various programs. ArcGIS, with its many different templates, and for which Wesleyan has a site license, seemed to be a good program to use. My research assistant—an undergraduate student at Wesleyan—and I have been creating interactive maps, adding images, documents and screen shots of old maps, and links to an additional website created with WordPress to enhance the story. However, the question that we still have and are discussing is: Are there other—and possibly better—programs than ArcGIS for creating online genealogical digital stories for personal use but also as a pedagogical tool in the classroom? The presentation will show the advantages and the limitations of the above-mentioned program and application and, we hope, engage the audience in an enabling and revelatory discussion.

Chair: Jessica McCullough
Kristen Abbott Bennett, "The Kit Marlowe Project"
This paper discusses the inception and evolution of The Kit Marlowe Project (www.kitmarlowe.org) to date, including its driving pedagogy, as well as our goals and challenges for moving forward. First launched at the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting as one of ten competitively chosen digital exhibits, The Kit Marlowe Project is a digital space designed to introduce undergraduates with diverse majors to project-driven, research-based learning, and digital humanities practices in the context of studying one of Elizabethan England’s most compelling literary figures. As one of Shakespeare’s most famous contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe was a poet, playwright, and likely spy; his friends called him “Kit” and so do we. The site has been created so that students may curate an open-source collection of Marlowe’s works, contribute exhibits, encyclopedia, and bibliography entries. This paper discusses approaches to inviting undergraduates to contribute to public digital humanities projects, specifically in the context of their contributions to cultural preservation efforts by using TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) methods, as well as resources from the Map of Early Modern London project (https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/) and LEMDO (Linked Early Modern Drama Online, https://lemdo.uvic.ca/) to transcribe, encode, and publish previously unpublished archival works in an open-access forum. 

Helene Visentin, "Mapping a 17th-Century French Novel"
I propose to focus my talk on a team-based project that aims to create a digital edition of a seminal French 17th-century novel, _La Princesse de Clèves_ (1678) by Lafayette, making the text accessible and appealing to an audience of 21st century undergraduates. We are developing both a navigable critical apparatus and approaches to teaching the novel through pedagogical modules and clusters to propose activities and analyses of the work using digital tools that students can adapt to create their own insights, including network visualization graphs, mapping technologies, and word mining tools. I would like to focus my talk on the digital mapping interface that we have been developing and that will be attached to the EPUB book. The main idea is to "map" the novel, i.e. characters' movements and the events related to them, as well as major landmarks and spaces in order to create a visual and spatial representation of _La Princesse de Clèves_ and to show the correlation between topographical elements and social interactions, the relationships between urban spaces and social spaces. 

Chair: Brooke Foti Gemmell

Gabriella Soto, "Border Matters: (Dis)assembling the contested border using the tools of digital humanities"
The Trump Administration’s proposed border wall has been a subject of many recent news headlines and ongoing national debate. There is a struggle to imagine what this wall will mean for migrant life and death, for border communities, the environment, and the security of the United States. Will the proposed monumental construction truly “secure the border”, and what does a secure border mean anyways? The near-complete digital humanities website, Border Matters, will allow visitors to explore these questions for themselves in the context of the already complete border wall built from 2006 to 2009 in southern Arizona—the highly traversed region of the US-Mexico border that has been 80 percent walled for over a decade. With the border wall as a starting point to conceptualize the militarization of the border and the strategic logic of border security, this regional case study will serve as a window to explore what those things really mean on-the-ground. Principally, the interactive components of the website will allow visitors to assemble and disassemble the wall’s effects: on processes of border crossing, patterns of migrant death along the border, wilderness land management, and the activities of those who seek to help migrants. The name of the website, Border Matters, is a literal prelude to the website content drawing from the material matters of the border—from the survival toolkits carried by migrants, the water stations created by humanitarian groups, the cleanups of the belongings left behind in border crossings, and the infrastructure of border “control.” This website integrates three elements of digital storytelling: story maps, timelines, and audio-visual content. In this presentation, I will take audience members through the website content, seeking feedback preceding its public launch in spring 2020. 

Jordan McMillan, "Accountability through Inquiry: Tools for Analyzing Understandings of Gun Violence"
We know that gun violence is considered an epidemic in the United States. However, media attention and  
legislative agendas focus primarily on mass shootings, leaving out the greatest sources of gun violence: suicides (that comprise 2/3 of all gun violence) and homicides (that disproportionately impact people of color). Additionally, it is not widely understood that 54% of mass shooting cases are related to domestic and family violence.

The problem of gun violence in the U.S. is clear, but entrenched social inequality influences how the public receives and interprets information about it. My proposed DH presentation topic, Accountability through Inquiry: Tools for Analyzing Understandings of Gun Violence, will address the problem of inequality in representations of gun violence in two ways. First, an ongoing digital exhibit will walk participants through an analysis of gun violence prevention activities and rhetoric from 2012 to present. Second, the project will house a repository of publicly available writings on gun violence alongside a toolkit for teaching methods of content and discourse analysis. The tool kit can be used in undergraduate research methods courses, community engagement programs, or by interested individuals and professionals.

Stefan Schoberlein, "The Movable Project: Archiving and Highlighting Recovery in Appalachia"
This presentation hopes to solicit feedback and engage with fellow DH scholars about the Movable Project, a geospatially oriented platform that hopes to share, highlight, and document stories of recovery from substance use disorder from Appalachia and beyond. The project, funded by the West Virginia Humanities Council and an opioid response grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, is currently in its final stages of developed and will go live towards the end of October (an early placeholder draft, before significant redesign, is available on movableproject.org). The first roll-out of the site is focused on usability, advocacy for the recovery community, as well as preservation of the perspectives and voices of people most directly affected by the opioid epidemic. While we’ve had extensive feedback from the recovery community, we’re hoping CTDH 2019 would allow us to engage with fellow DH scholars (especially those working outside of Appalachia) to open up the project to more research-based inquires in the future. Our next grant application aims to not only expand the scope of the archive in terms of content but also turn it into a more explicitly scholarly tool that is more welcoming to questions of distant reading, macroanalysis, and stylometry. We believe CTDH would be a wonderful opportunity to begin this conversation.     

Chair: Mary Mahoney

Lyndsay Bratton, Christopher Steiner, Benjamin Beranek, and Danielle Egan, "Supporting Experimental Research in the Liberal Arts: The Digital Scholarship Fellows Program at Connecticut College"
One of the strengths of small liberal arts colleges is the potential for rich faculty-student research at the undergraduate level. Digital scholarship affords LACs significant opportunities to leverage these collaborations, developing students’ research and technology skill sets through experiential learning, and reaching new and broader audiences through online publishing.

Our joint program between the Library and the Office of the Dean of Faculty, currently in its second year, is rapidly building a community of practice in digital scholarship at Connecticut College. The program brings three faculty members together with staff from across the library’s departments, providing project funding, technical support and training, faculty stipends, and community. The program supports projects that promote faculty-student collaboration across the lifecycle of a digital research project through course assignments, independent studies, and summer research assistantships.

The second cohort’s projects span a range of topics across the humanities and social sciences from a digital archive of a hidden outsider art collection, “The Nut Museum,” to a behavioral economics mapping and data visualization project on within-society variation in social preferences, which has been thoughtfully integrated into a first-year seminar. Through discovering the affordances of digital scholarship together, these faculty are experimenting with new pathways for developing and sharing their research, as well as exciting ways to bring the diverse aspects of their research interests together in multidisciplinary projects. In this panel, the three faculty fellows and the director leading the program will present strategies for building an inclusive community of digital scholarship and pedagogy through campus partnerships and collaboration across the merged library organization. We will also discuss our developing workflows for bringing projects to fruition in a relatively resource-limited environment, while maintaining ethical standards for faculty-student research and building knowledge to empower faculty to move forward with their projects beyond the limits of the program.

Rama Co, Sofia Sperber, and Philippe Bungabong, "Politics by Other Magazines: The General-Interest Periodical in the Early Philippine Commonwealth” and “Chinatown Opera Houses at the Turn of the Century"
In 2018, Wesleyan University Library and Information Technology Services launched the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program, a fellowship program that offers a small cohort of students multifaceted skills-development opportunities for pursuing research in the digital humanities. The inaugural cohort is composed of Rama Co, a College of Letters (Great Books Program) and Philosophy major; Sofia Sperber, a Sociology and Environmental Studies major; and Philippe Bungabong, an Economics and Mathematics major. Despite concentrating in different fields, the inaugural Digital Scholarship Fellows are collaborating on two DH projects that combine the disciplines of history, art, politics, and economics.

Their first project, entitled “Politics by Other Magazines: The General-Interest Periodical in the Early Philippine Commonwealth”, examines the issues of Philippine Magazine, an English-language, general-interest periodical from the early Philippine Commonwealth (1934-1936), which served as the premier outlet for the publication of Filipino political and literary works during the Philippines’ period of transitional independence from American rule. The project aims to compare the political and non-political content within Philippine Magazine in order to identify potential cross-pollination between these modes of discourse.

The second project, entitled “Chinatown Opera Houses at the Turn of the Century,” looks at the rise and decline of Chinese theaters in the United States at the turn of the last century, and catalogue archival photographs, playbills, advertisements and sound recordings of the largely forgotten art. This project aims to provide a centralized digital archive for Chinese opera and its role in Chinese immigrants’ lives, especially with regards to building community and culture around the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Optical character recognition, topic modeling, text mining, and GIS story-mapping are the primary techniques of data analysis in these projects. Ultimately, the Digital Scholarship Fellows hope to utilize modern technology in uncovering and understanding the complexities of the humanities.

Chairs: Amanda Nelson

Dianne Fallon, "Reducing the digital divide: Exploring the Maine's Alien Registration order with community college students"
In my presentation, I will discuss how I am using the digital archive for Maine’s 1940 Alien Registration Order to introduce community college students to archival research, to the Omeka exhibition platform and concepts of metadata, and the use of spreadsheets in creating data visualizations, specifically with the tool “Flowmaps Blue.”  I will also explore how the archival research from another era helps students to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of immigration issues today, and also discuss pedagogical and ethical considerations in making student work public, especially when the work may need further documentation and editing. My presentation will include my Omeka site in progress as well as a basic explanation of how to use the “Flowmaps Blue” mapping tool.  Link: https://yorkcountyhistory.org/maine-alien-registration-order-of-1940/

Deb Smith and Lisa Timothy, "Using Omeka in Public Libraries to create local history collections"
Public librarians are frequently gatekeepers of valuable local history collections, but few receive or have any access to training in the creation of digital collections. The online course Creating Local Linkages, offered by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, specifically trains public librarians to create digital local history collections using Omeka. Omeka is a platform familiar to historians and academic librarians but much less well known to public librarians. Hear from two public librarians who have completed this course, exploring the benefits and challenges of using Omeka to create digital local history collections.  

The panel will address the practical challenges of creating digital history collections in public libraries, specifically covering issues such as staffing, time, training, funding and copyright. Opportunities and the benefits of wider collaboration between academia and public libraries will also be explored.

Patrick Murray-John, "A WordPress-Institutional Repository Connector, updated for WordPress 5 : The Gutenbergification"
Northeastern University uses a custom WordPress plugin for public facing web exhibitions using content from our institutional repository and other sources. Currently there are nearly forty sites produced by faculty research projects, teaching sites, and our archives and special collections. The original plugin was based on WordPress's shortcode system.

With WordPress 5, that shortcode system fell out of favor, with the preference moving toward the React-based Gutenberg editing interface.

This demonstration and discussion will compare and contrast the old and new systems of our WordPress plugin, with brief but detailed notes about the technical, user experience, and philosophical changes involved in the transition.

We will start with the close relationship between publication via WordPress and content management primarily with our institutional repository. Then, we will look at the affordances (and deficiencies) of WordPress as a publication platform with that technical dependency. Finally, the evolution of the plugin prompted by WordPress's development will address the constraints and possibilities in WordPress 5.

Chair: Sara Sikes

Jim Cocola, "All the Feels: Affective Analysis for Literary Studies"
When evaluating matters of content, language, and style among writers, machine reading can help humans discern patterns too arduous to tabulate by hand. In this paper (which could also be remediated as a demonstration) I employ natural language processing through the use of regular expressions in the Python programming language in order to conduct affective analyses across a series of literary genres: modern drama, the modern novel, modern poetry, and the slave narrative. While a well-established tradition of stylometry has employed similar methods toward the end of authorial attribution, and recent work in the digital humanities has focused on large corpora (Jockers) or single texts (Moretti), my efforts turn on questions of comparative literature concerning specific aesthetic movements, national traditions, and subject positions. Whereas sentiment analysis employs text mining methods in pursuit of coarser distinctions (positive, neutral, negative), I aim at a broader and deeper parsing of affect, drawing on classifications by leading psychologists in the field (James, Lazarus and Lazarus). In this vein, machine reading enables questions that may not even occur to human readers alone. Is modern drama happier or sadder in America or Britain? Which modern novelists—in emphasizing pain over pleasure—have the most masochistic tendencies? Are Romantic poets more likely to emphasize singular over plural forms of feeling? Do slave narratives by men contain more anger, fear, and rage than slave narratives by women? Natural language processing promises to teach us much about the ways in which writers use language to express affect. I aim to offer an overview and exemplification of that potential in these remarks. In the process, I will also attend to classroom applications in a seminar I'll be offering concurrently at WPI titled "Textual Engineering," possibly including contributions from one or more students enrolled in that seminar.

Yohei Igarashi, "Philological Data"
This paper returns to the early decades of English as a professionalized, departmentalized university discipline, and recovers how American philologists undertook an early and significant datafication of literary works. Specifically, my paper considers The Concordance Society (founded at the 1906 MLA meeting by the philologist, Albert S. Cook), which went on in the ensuing decades to produce collaboratively a series of concordances, via paper slips and other pre-electronic media, primarily for canonical vernacular poets. We know already from disciplinary histories that philologists dominated the discipline in the later nineteenth century – wielding more professional power than belletristic, appreciationist instructors – due to their credentials and the then-reigning disciplinary ideal of scientificity. We know too from histories of humanities computing that a landmark moment in “literary data processing” was the 1964 conference of the same name, organized by English professors Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. and Stephen M. Parrish in conjunction with IBM computer scientists. But in between these two moments, The Concordance Society – founded when philology was beginning its decline, but before the electronic literary data processing projects that would follow in the Society’s footsteps – is particularly instructive for us today with regard to the notion of literary data. This paper demonstrates that The Concordance Society negotiated between two views of literature: literature viewed as aggregable documents capable of yielding data, information, and facts, and literature viewed belletristically as artworks. By relating Lane Cooper’s 1911 Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth to later 19th-century philological scholarly practice, and drawing on recent theories of data, this paper suggests that the original tension between philological datafication and belletristic appreciation runs through the history of literary study – and that this tension can grasped not as an irresolvable, enduring conflict but as pointing to the ontological flexibility of literary artifacts as a modern disciplinary object.

Emmet De Barra, Wes Hamrick, Brendan Kane, Tom Scheinfeldt, "Digital Tools for Language Learning"
We write to propose a discussion of digital pedagogy through a demonstration of Léamh.org, a web-based tutorial for learning to read and translate texts in Early Modern Irish that launched in 2017. We also propose to discuss Greenhouse Studios’ current, ongoing development of a digital language game for Early Modern Irish.

Léamh (pronounced LAY-uv) is the Irish word for “reading” or “to read.” The purpose of Léamh.org was to mitigate a lack of available resources for learning Early Modern Irish and to make historically important texts written in the language accessible to a much broader readership. The website includes a grammar, a 7,000-word glossary, and a selection of early modern texts accompanied by interactive annotations and translations.

While Léamh.org continues to be updated with additional material, in 2018 we assembled a project team whose charge was not merely to augment or improve the existing website, but to fundamentally rethink and reconceive the relationship between Early Modern Irish and pedagogy. To that end, the project team is currently working on a stand-alone, digital grammar game for teaching and learning Early Modern Irish. Though a game can’t fully replace a conventional descriptive grammar, learning Early Modern Irish by means of a digital game has at least two distinct advantages. For one, gamification provides built-in psychological rewards that encourage the user to maintain a regular program of learning. Secondly, a digital game allows for the collection of aggregated data on learners’ progress through the game, thereby helping to identify aspects of the language that learners find particularly difficult or for which they simply need additional time to master. In turn, this data can provide valuable information about language pedagogy and language acquisition more generally.

Chair: Douglas Duhaime

Sarah Payne, William Quinn, and Avery Blankenship
Our panel demonstrates various applications for text mining and literature, with a particular focus on how text mining tools illuminate our understandings of race, gender, and class in 19th and 20th century literature. The first paper will address the use of RStudio to perform a sentiment analysis of 20th century passing novels. Using both sentiment analysis and RStudio visualization tools, this paper will examine whether it is possible to track and visualize a conception of race that goes beyond, and perhaps refuses, the black/white racial binary. The second paper will use both BookNLP and Python to try and create a computational version of the Bechdel test. Applying this Bechdel test to nineteenth century novels demonstrates the risk of encoded gender bias, as machine learning methodologies still rely on training data provided by human programmers. Ultimately, this paper argues for more gender diversity in digital humanities and computational fields. The final paper focuses on Ezra Pound’s departure from the editorial board of Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, and his accusation that the magazine had become a “meal-ticket” for mediocre poets. Contrary to Pound and others’ vision of the isolated poetic genius, an idea entangled in class, computational tools can recuperate the collective collaboration within magazines. Using doc2vec, this paper shows how a communal form of production, based on literary recycling and reuse, was a central aspect of modernist poetry. While we welcome those experienced in digital methods, we aim to make our panel accessible to those with little to no text mining experience. Our panel will provide a user-friendly approach that balances methods with interpretation. We hope to introduce both students and practitioners to possible uses of text mining and demonstrate the benefit, and even necessity, of applying humanistic methods to digital technology.

Chair: Julia Holz

Daniel Gorman Jr., “Digitizing Rochester’s Religions: Piloting a Community–University Partnership in the Digital Humanities”
​Launched under the stewardship of Dr. Margarita Guillory, Digitizing Rochester’s Religions aimed to document the entire religious history of Rochester, N.Y. While historians have studied the effects of the Second Great Awakening (1800–30) in western New York, they have not given equal attention to the region’s religious life during the Civil War, industrialization and deindustrialization, and the Civil Rights Movement. The graduate and undergraduate students working on DRR sought to correct this oversight by writing narratives of key religious sites, creating interactive maps, and digitizing primary sources from the community. When Dr. Guillory received an appointment at another university, however, it became my responsibility as the lead graduate student researcher to finish the project. DRR in its final form is a pilot project. By documenting religious life in Rochester’s southwest quadrant, we show how historians might do this work on a larger scale. My presentation will address both the public history and digital history aspects of DRR. In terms of public history, I will discuss how to develop reciprocal relationships with faith communities, how to secure permission for publishing community archives online, and how to balance academic research plans with the needs of community partners. As for digital humanities technology, I will address the process of scanning, formatting, cataloguing, and backing up 130 gigabytes’ worth of primary sources. Finally, I will consider DRR as an example of successful project-based learning, since the students who worked on DRR gained hands-on archival, ethnographic, and digital humanities experience. 
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Michael Milner, "Teaching Students to Become Researchers in their Lives and Communities: Pedagogy, Digital Humanities, and Learning from Place"
Teaching Students to Become Researchers in their Lives and Communities: Pedagogy, Digital Humanities, and Learning from Place

This talk uses as its jumping off place my recent work creating a digital mapping project called “The Historical Atlas of Lowell” (at mappinglowell.net). The mapping project provides an easy-to-use platform for students to work with maps that tell open-ended stories and introduce challenging questions about the history of the city of Lowell. For instance, students can investigate the way capital produced in Lowell was re-invested in Boston (not Lowell) throughout the first part of the 19th century. In turn, students must consider issues of uneven development and its ethical problems; they are encouraged to ask if such dynamics are still significant in the 21st century.

The talk focuses more on why I created this project, than on the nuts and bolts of how it was created. I explain the project’s pedagogical goals, which involve using technology to help students produce interdisciplinary knowledge about their communities and, ultimately, about their own lives and situations. The goal of the project is to teach students how to be researchers in their communities and how to present that research to a broad public in interactive, engaging ways. We desperately need such researchers — both professional and lay — in today’s world.

Anna Vallye and Rose Oliveira, "Mapping Urban Renewal in East New London"
This presentation introduces a new initiative at Connecticut College, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Research for the Public Good Grant from The Council of Independent Colleges. Titled Mapping Urban Renewal in New London, CT, our project brings to light the history and impact of urban renewal in an East New London neighborhood adjacent to the College. Urban renewal and highway construction in the 1940s-1960s destroyed much of the historic urban fabric in this area and displaced many residents in this largely minority and underprivileged community. Working with teams of students, using local archives and the testimony of long-time residents, we are reconstructing the planning decisions and events of the time, and tracing transformations in the urban fabric. This project will produce a GIS-based StoryMap website, including documents and oral histories, as well as present a series of public events.

Project Team members will share highlights of the ongoing grant project connecting undergraduate students with the archival and library collections at their institutions and partnering with community nonprofits to bring the students’ work to the public. We will share what we have accomplished so far, present sneak previews of the student work underway, and provide tips and lessons learned for those who want to embark on similar projects.

Chair: Joelle E. Thomas

Kristen Abbott Bennett,and Hedda Monaghan, "Creating Rams Write, a student-generated, public, online writing resource"
In Fall 2018, we initiated a collaboration between the Library and the English Department to create a model of digital student-scholarship that has resulted in Rams Write (https://libguides.framingham.edu/rams_write), an open-access, online guide designed by first-year writing students at Framingham State University to help their peers write strong academic essays. In these writing classes, students initially self-identified writing challenges before working in groups to research, design, and create copy for web exhibits addressing specific topics for public in the Henry Whittemore Library’s Research Guides (aka “LibGuides”) section of their website. Public-facing, student-generated digital humanities projects like Rams Write offer students the ability to experience knowledge-making in action. Students learn research, web design (here, in the LibGuides editor), and writing skills they need to make real-world, public-facing contributions to our knowledge base. Our primary learning outcomes from these projects are twofold. One has been that students develop “metaliteracies,” a pedagogical framework conceived by Trudi E. Jacobson and Tom Mackey that synthesizes cognitive, behavioral, affective, and metacognitive learning outcomes (see www.metaliteracies.org). The other is to deepen students’ facility with online information by drawing inspiration from the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework). This paper presentation offers an overview of the project’s driving pedagogies, learning outcomes, and a walk-through of the site itself.

Kelly Mahaffy, Tina Huey, and Karen Skudlarek, "Digital Humanities in the Classroom: The Pedagogical Ethics of Digital Approaches to Scholarship"
Digital humanities, and digital tools, represent some of the most exciting and engaging work being done in graduate and undergraduate humanistic classrooms. While these tools are tremendously useful, we must consider how instructors, as those with power in a classroom, can require or demand participation in a digital environment in which we often struggle to safeguard the circulation of student work.

We hope that, by opening our discussion to instructors at all stages of their careers and who rely on digital tools differently, we can begin to work against what Toby Coley describes as “uncritical acceptance of digital media technologies” which “inculcates something in our students’ psyches” and can have effects on their social lives outside the classroom community (100). To develop solutions to some of the most pressing questions in teaching with digital tools we hope to include conversations about: the intention behind digital tools in the classroom; the effect of the institution, particularly in their contracts with tech giants like Google or Microsoft for student email services; and how we can balance convenience and practicality with bigger picture privacy as well as what information we should share with our students about digital circulation. We hope to put ethical concerns at the center of the digital humanities discussion and insist that it belongs there. Given the many clear affordances of digital technologies, and that we are committed to continuing to create a safe space for our students, even online, we hope that this discussion will generate ideas about how to make the continued use of digital tools exciting, safe, and intentional for both students and instructors.

Marina Hassapopoulou, "Expanding DH through multimedia scholarship"
This workshop will consist of: a) a showcase of a range of multimedia scholarship and classroom projects, from digital and interactive to analog; b) an introduction to some DIY and easily accessible tools for digital modes of writing; c) suggestions for archiving practices that attempt to counter the ephemerality of digital work, along with some practical recommendations for ethically sharing content containing copyrighted material.
The projects and tools presented aim to provide an expanded understanding of the epistemological potential of DH practices, beyond typical uses of computational tools and data-driven approaches; the focus is on expanding traditional methodologies and writing platforms, rather than replacing them.

Chair: Jeff Liszka

Shawn Hill, "DH Evangelizing in the Academy"
Attending professional conferences like CTDH 2020 is often a heady rush of new perspectives, projects, tools, colleagues, and research. While immersing oneself in gatherings of fellow-travelers is undoubtedly rewarding and enriching, returning to our home institutions often compels us to ask ourselves how we can encourage our non-DH colleagues to consider or (hopefully) incorporate digital humanities approaches in their own research/scholarship and pedagogy.

As an Instructional Technologist nested in an IT department, one of my ongoing challenges has been to constantly refine my Why-not-try-new-digital-technology-in-your-classroom? pitch to faculty. I look forward to sharing conversations and approaches that have worked, and some that have failed to encourage faculty (who don't self identify as DH practitioners) to consider venturing out of their comfort zones and trying something new in the classroom.

Kate Boylan, Mark LeBlanc, and Thomas San Filippo, "Archiving & Broadcasting Born-Digital Content"
We present an interdepartmental collaboration to build and deploy a workflow of effective practices for faculty and students as they create, catalog, manage, curate, and disseminate the growing collection of their digital works. The need for systematic workflows stem from a flurry of entrepreneurial work on our residential campus and has sparked our institution to action toward continual improvement and production of digitized collections. We report on a workflow with four faculty from multiple disciplines where pieces of digital scholarship are initially stored, managed, and shared on an individual's personal digital space, and curated pieces become a new type of collection elevated to and stored for wider dissemination and use as the foundation of new and future scholarship.

Chair: Andrew White
Dan Bennett, Cat Hannula, Mario Valdebenito Rodas, "Using Virtual Tools to Create Equitable Pathways into Physical Spaces"
Smith College’s central library is currently undergoing significant renovations. An essential portion of our first year libraries orientation program is a mandatory Libraries Scavenger Hunt dedicated to educating students on where they can still access library resources. Some of Smith College’s branch libraries are difficult to navigate which could limit some students’ ability to physically access these spaces. In order to provide an equitable solution, members of IT and the Libraries utilized 360º photography, H5P and WordPress to create 360º virtual tours as an inclusive alternative to help students complete the Scavenger Hunt.
Our presentation will discuss the conception, planning and implementation of this project, including organizational collaboration, stakeholder management, and the specific technologies used. We will also discuss how the results of this project are being implemented for public facing digital humanities projects in classes. This project is also being scaled in a way to provide the Smith community the ability to easily create more accessible pathways as our campus changes with the opening of our new library.


Madeline Miller, Victoria Corwin, Ellie Ng, Alexander Cotnoir, "Dartmouth Undying; using a library escape room to introduce open access concepts via zombie apocalypse"
How can gaming be used to interactively explore complex or unfamiliar materials and concepts? To engage college students and staff with Open Access concepts, primary sources, and research tools, our team of post-baccalaureate fellows built an escape room with materials from the media center, engineering school’s machine shop, institutional archives, and even discarded library book bins. In contrast to conventional methods of outreach and teaching, our escape room attracts and appeals to hard-to-reach audiences by centering around social entertainment, gaming, and storytelling. As evidence of this, so far we’ve reached a wide variety of audiences, including students, staff, our campus museum, and a digital humanities course on Storytelling in the Digital Age.

Our presentation will cover the process we employed to create our escape room, including the challenges and opportunities we encountered collaborating with Dartmouth’s engineering school, special collections library, and media center. We will discuss escape rooms as a method for engagement and learning, and end with exploring the outcomes of our project.

Chair: Andrew Lopez

Fionnuala Darby-Hudgens, Kaytlin Ernske, Sophia Lopez, Jack Dougherty, "Mapping Connecticut’s Civil Rights History"
How can we engage the public and deepen understanding of Connecticut’s civil rights history by designing interactive web maps? What challenges arise when storytelling emphasizes the spatial dimension? What opportunities emerge when interactive maps reveal insights unseen in conventional text or static images? Panelists will discuss how they address these questions, and demonstrate different approaches to answering them through their digital humanities projects.

Fionnuala Darby-Hudgens (Trinity ‘13), Director of Operations at the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, partnered with students Kaytlin Ernske (Trinity ‘20) and Sophia Lopez (Trinity ‘22) through the Public Humanities Collaborative at Trinity College, and Ilya Ilyankou (Trinity ‘18) at the CT Data Collaborative. Together they created a storymap, “Urban Renewal in Windham: Willimantic’s Lost Neighborhood,” which explores how urban renewal transformed downtown Willimantic in the 1960s and ‘70s. The storymap is designed to illuminate the effects of aggressive urban renewal and highlight the impact of discriminatory housing policies. The students worked with the Connecticut Studies collection at the Eastern Connecticut State University, Towne Engineering, INC, members of the city council, the Willimantic Town Hall, the Mill Museum, and Willimantic residents to collect public records, newspapers, maps, municipal policy documents, public meeting minutes, and photo archives. See https://www.ctfairhousing.org/fair-housing-tour/willimantic-urban-renewal/, and related CFHC storymaps “Urban renewal in New London CT” https://www.ctfairhousing.org/new-london-urban-renewal-tour/, and the “Hartford Fair Housing Tour,” https://www.ctfairhousing.org/fair-housing-tour/hartford-fair-housing-history-tour/.

Also, Trinity professor Jack Dougherty will demonstrate newer maps that he and Ilyankou have created to illuminate historical change for the open-access book, On The Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and its Suburbs (http://OnTheLine.trincoll.edu).

Stefan Kehlenbach, "The Biopolitics of Big Data"
This paper argues that  the connection between neoliberalism and big data should be understood as a project of biopolitics, with the result of dividing sovereignty between public institutions and private corporations. Understanding the impact and ongoing influence of Big Data on neoliberalism and populism is necessary for understanding our society. I argue that Big Data is more than a methodology, it is a societal rationality, that supplements and reinforces the political rationality of neoliberalism. An outcome of the neoliberal-Big Data project is the development of a corporate biopolitics which allows corporations to participate in the neoliberal governmentality and not merely be subject to it.  I argue that we should understand this connection through the lens of biopolitics, as defined by Michel Foucault. For Foucault, biopolitics involves “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations,” (Foucault 1990). Understanding Big Data as a project of biopolitics means that we fully grapple with the political and social implications of its use in society. This reveals the danger in Facebook assuming the role of the public square and controlling political discourse, and Google providing public goods for society. In doing so they create multiple sovereignties within society, diluting and modifying the formal power of the state. This allows for citizenship itself to be redefined. The scholarship surrounding neoliberalism shows how market participation becomes the requirement for public citizenship. However, in this new Big Data biopolitics, individuals are not participants in the market but commodities. This connection between neoliberal market logic and the biopolitics of Big Data fundamentally redefines our own understandings of what it means to be a participating citizen in political society. 

Chair: Wes Hamrick

Anthony Graesch and Lyndsay Bratton, "The Kw’éts’tel Project: Integrating Open Scholarship into Research Design and Peer Review into Open Scholarship"
Kw’éts’tel is a Halq'eméylem term for a knife used for well over 2,000 years by Stó:lō-Coast Salish families in the Fraser Valley of southwestern British Columbia principally for butchering and processing salmon. The design of these tools corresponded to the very specific needs of processing massive quantities of salmon for wind drying and storage. While archaeologists have recovered broken and intact knives as well as knife-making byproducts, the use of these artifacts to infer past behavior has been hampered by a limited understanding of how the tools were made. This digital scholarship project presents experimental archaeological research addressing the technological practices - the raw materials, tool combinations, haptic knowledge, and organization of the body - entailed in Stó:lō-Coast Salish use and manufacture of a tool crucial to local foodways.

An outcome of faculty-student research at Connecticut College, the Kw’éts’tel project website aims to make research questions, data, and findings accessible to wider audiences as well as descendant communities and stakeholders. Nested in a broader collaboration with Chawathil First Nation, the Stō:ló Research and Resource Management Centre, and Musqueam Nation, the work expands on and serves as a digital companion to conventionally published academic research while exploring new ideas and new ways of knowing using data that cannot be disseminated in analog or even most digital journal publications owing to restrictions in size, format, or abundance. 

Speakers will highlight effective engagement of undergraduate students in faculty-student digital scholarship, the impacts of open scholarship principles and practices on research design, and developing peer and community review processes for scholarly online publishing.

Evan Young, "“All of it is a code anyway”: Augmenting a Literary Web for Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead"
The presentation describes an ongoing hybrid-form augmented reality (AR) project designed to invite readers into an interactive engagement of Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead. A digital project housed on paper cards, the project’s argument occurs on both analytical and structural levels. Color-coded textual pathways and AR video experiences embedded on the page strive to intensify readers' engagements with Almanac, prompting readers to be more intentional in thinking about how voices that are not their own are orchestrated in critical writing.

Readers may activate AR video experiences via the iPhone/Android app LifePrint. AR technology has vast potential as a decolonial tool; the ability to embed these experiences on the printed page means that Indigenous creators cited have more agency in “speaking for themselves.” Their voices are augmented, extending beyond the two-dimensional limits of the page. Color bars on each card correspond with conceptual themes present on a given card. With a human reader activating a hyperlink between cards, same-color color bars serve as portals that offer additional ways of reading alongside the ever-possible option to read linearly by page number. Readers may shuffle cards according to these color bars, opening up multiplicitous future readings of the project with the potential to evoke connections and insights that might remain encrypted in a traditionally linear reading. The act of shuffling inputs a randomness factor into future readings. Essentially hyperlinks, these connections are present in a virtual state of potentiality before the possibility of a reader recognizing them—decoding them—might even occur.

This project develops AR video experiences alongside interrelated passages of color-coded text in the hopes of more accurately reflecting the episodic, nonlinear, fragmented, and rhizomatic characteristics of the entangled story-worlds which, when recognized as diverse manifestations of a greater whole, constitute Almanac of the Dead.