The NY Historical Society has decided that the Post It Notes from the Union Square subway station collected as “therapy” during and after the recent election should be preserved as historical documents.  More information on this at DNAinfo.  The article does not mention any plan to digitize these, but I do think there’s an opportunity for a digital archive component to this collection.  I look forward to seeing what becomes of this collection and how the NY Historical Society handles the objects of a public memorial.

I did my best to keep up with the readings and come prepared to class to discuss them, but I will admit that there were weeks some of the readings were technically over my head and there were other weeks that I was not able to get to all the readings (thanks to a full time job that was especially demanding this semester).

One thought that kept occurring to me over the semester was to do a distant reading on the entirety of the assigned readings.  I wonder what kind of hidden (and not so hidden) meanings could be analyzed from this kind of undertaking.  I foresee a thick network of DH terms and concepts arising and I am interested to put that visualization out there.  Although Moretti’s work at the Stanford Literary Lab in deep reading is mostly literary in nature, I do think there’s room for our collection of texts from the semester in this kind of project.

When I was applying to the MALS program about six months ago, I read this article in the NYTimes which I am only now putting together with Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, and Trees.  Needless to say, I value the bibliography that I am walking away with from this course.

I honestly do not have much to add to everyone’s observations of guest editing, but I did enjoy the dedicated hour/day that I spent nominating content.  It gave me a week of daily-dedicated time to review news, projects, and other musings in the world of DH.

As previously noted, the time I was editing (Nov. 14-20) was heavily influenced by the consequences and dialog surrounding the presidential election (just logged in again and that still seems to be showing up regularly in the feed).  Nonetheless, there were sill several posts worth nominating that were not related to the election.  The nomination process was super easy and the instructions from DH Now were easy to follow (also previously noted).

There were several blogs and content that I was already familiar with, but I found it very helpful to be exposed to new content that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.   I’ll definitely continue to monitor this and also schedule another week to volunteer next semester!

After hitting the send key on my final project proposal a few short hours ago, I can already think of ways to improve it.  I am proposing a digital archive called: Kamishibai Digital Archive – The Art of Japanese Storytelling.  In summary, the archive would attempt to: 

“preserve the existing legacy of gaito (street-style) Kamishibai, a Japanese cultural treasure and form of paper theater and storytelling (sometimes referred to as “Street-Corner Theater”) popular in Japan with a growing audience across cultures (rising interest in this form of storytelling in the United States, Europe, and throughout Asia).  It will center around the story cards created and used during the “Golden Age” of Kamishibai–considered to be between the Great Depression of the 1930s to the Japanese surrender to the Allied forces in 1945.  It will also serve as a portal to understand the cultural impact (relationship to contemporary forms of storytelling) of this art form, its influences (Buddhist scrolls), and its legacy (Manga).  Tools to be used will be the online publishing platform Scalar or Omeka, Carto for mapping, and Timeline.js for creating an interactive timeline.  An ultimate goal will be to include a platform where students, scholars, researchers, and any interested party can learn about this medium and then create their own kamishibai stories using a platform like FOLD, an open source story creator developed by MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media.”

You can read more of my proposal here.

There are some serious limitations on this project, however.  First and foremost is the access to content (kamishibai story cards) that can be digitized.  There are several cultural institutions in the U.S. that have some of the pictures from the golden age of gaito (street) kamishibai, but most of the materials would be available in Japan.  As much as I would love to visit there next semester, I do not think it is possible at this moment.  I do have a librarian colleague that is from Japan and she will be traveling there this spring, but I cannot rely on her to gather all the materials for me.  Nonetheless, she could be instrumental in helping me contact the various archives, museums, and libraries in Japan that have kamishibai in their collections.  Even if I am able to get my colleague to do some object gathering for me, I am not sure if there are many cards from the time period I am interested in focusing on.  My project proposes to focus on street performed story cards produced in the 1930s to 1950s.  I am not fully aware of the current availability of materials from that period.  More research is needed to determine the amount of objects available from that time.  Nonetheless, I have identified cultural organizations and can begin reaching out to determine this information.   Finally, another limitation of my proposal is that I have not fully worked out the timeline and all the key events relating to this cultural moment.  I plan to continue my research to work out a more detailed timeline.  I also plan to include images in the timeline (and hopefully the location of where they were created and performed to be incorporated into the map component of the project) so that the images can be included in the timeline.

My first introduction to kamishibai was a few short months ago at a friend’s theater performance and I was so struck by the medium that I think it is a worthwhile undertaking to create a digital archive to preserve the history, evolution, and cultural influences of kamishibai.  I am excited to reach out to Tara McGowan (author of Performing Kamishibai: An Emerging New Literacy for a Global Audience, 2015) and Eric P. Nash (author of Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater, 2009) who both live in the trip-state area.  I think they will be excited by the potential of this project too! 

For my final project I decided to write a reflexive paper that investigates the current state of DH in Spain and how it can help deal with historical memory. To begin with, I intended to tackle some of the issues relevant to the field of digital history from a contemporary perspective, and go over some of the authors we had seen throughout this semester, including Cameron Blevins, Daniel J. Cohen, Matthew K. Gold, Roy Rosenzweig, Douglas Seefeldt, and William G. Thomas.

Moreover, the main part of the paper constitutes an analysis of the digital projects that are being done in Spain at the moment, in order to A) compare them with some of the projects we have studied over the course of the DH Praxis Seminar, and B) demonstrate how these new methodologies can change the field from an academic perspective.

I gave a special emphasis to the projects that use a particular software platform called Dédalo—as I already introduced the day I presented my project back in November—since it was conceived as an open-source and free working tool that could ease the task of managing, cataloguing, sharing and promoting intangible culture heritage and oral history. Some of the digital history projects I had the opportunity to explore are the Museu de la Paraula, the Memorial Democràtic, Herri Memoria, and Mujer y Memoria.

I will actually get a chance to meet Alejandro Peña and Francisco Onielfa on Friday, December 23rd in Valencia. Alejandro and Francisco are the creators of Dédalo, and I am really looking forward to hearing their perspective on the state of DH in Spain nowadays and how digital history projects can be incorporated into academic curriculums. Unfortunately, I will not be able to include that part in my paper, but I am sure that talking about all these issues with them will turn out to be very helpful and enlightening regardless.

My final project is a Commons website that compares my data project with another related project. Link to project:

https://hashtagfeminism.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

During our last class together, students spoke of their grant proposals, extensions of their data projects, and the digital archives or editions they planned to build. My final project, however, takes a more established route—a twenty-page paper—even as it explores how digital humanities methodologies like quantitative research and visualization afford literary scholars new opportunities to re-envision what I call the procedural arc of their work and new opportunities to critique these methodologies.

Making this argument set me on a different course than the one I expected after my own presentation. In fact, after Lisa’s suggestion to read W. J. T. Mitchell’s Iconology, I fully expected to discuss the ideological interplay of text and image and how, possibly, it might relate to contemporary digital humanities work in literary studies (my paper examines my own data project and some of Tanya Clement’s scholarship). Instead, I found myself, eventually, turning back to the discussions we had in the opening weeks, namely those that attempted to define the digital humanities. Yes, the digital humanities do involve new tools and new ways of doing humanistic scholarship. And yet they also take these tools and new modes of scholarship as areas of inquiry. How could I describe these developments and impulses and make sense of the changes that the digital humanities have brought to the field of literary studies? For those interested, I’ve posted my paper as a PDF in our group’s files area. Looking forward to next semester.