Stephanie Schlitz's Blog

in addition to snorkeling, swimming, some seriously overdue momming, and a long reading list (literature, some pre-fall planning, and a list i’m co-reading with my recently turned ten-year-old), my research agenda remains active this summer. MBDA continues to advance, and i’m writing two different discussions of the project which require serious reflection on the intersections between theory, methodology, and practice. one is more narrative focused (the convergence of history and story, a motif poignant in description of the life and work of Martha Berry), one more theory-meets-practice-meets-tech (critical to advancement and redefinition of the archive, a theme pressing in my thoughts and evolving constantly thanks to some excellent writings which push us ever further into new terrain, e.g., “We are archivists, since we have to be. We don’t have choice. This decision is already made, or determined by the contemporary technological condition…”).

i’m also directing the Pennsylvania Dialects Project (PDP). i’ve continued to localize my research agenda, and PDP is rooted in rural central Pennsylvania, my current home, my university’s home, and the focus of PDP’s research purpose. we’re at the very early stages of the project, but because i’ve woven it intimately within my teaching and research agendas, and because i have some exceptional student collaborators, the study is proceeding remarkably well.

i was rereading Eat, Pray, Love recently (an excellent antidote to funkiness – and i don’t mean the groovy kind – which apparently i still have need of) and laughed quietly to myself when i bumped headfirst into Gilbert admonishing “You are, after all, what you think.” serendipitous? sought out unconsciously? i’m open to all kinds of interpretations… but, however it happened, lately, i’m a little chocolate cake meets democratization of information meets history and story collide meets documentation of dialect is critical to eradication of dialect prejudice, which, by the way, is alive and well. oh, plus: it’s very cool to pull the linguist card when your child is into J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. very. so i’m also a bit hey darling, did you know that tolkien was a linguist… too.

Great news: The Martha Berry Digital Archive (MBDA) project is launching this week. Of course we anticipate a few unexpected surprises (technical as well as human), but we look forward to the challenge and to seeing the project grow!

In the midst of debugging our site upgrade and thereafter finally turning toward site styling. Despite the bugs and incomplete design scheme, archive data is solid. We’ve mapped c. one-third of the scanned and published collection (and there’s quite a bit more yet to scan and publish) and geolocation data (shown in the map below) is just beginning to offer a very cool visual of Berry’s far-reaching influence:

Just finished a fairly comprehensive draft of Discovering Martha Berry for MBDA, which is scheduled to be released publicly in April. The piece is not yet garnished with images or other visual flourishes, but it was wonderful to write, and equally intriguing to mine the archive for sources. Berry is an incredibly interesting subject, and I find her – simultaneously – elusive, extroverted, vivacious, intense, and witty. Though I’ve spent c. 2.5 years working intimately with her writings, I’ve yet either to tire of her or precisely to pin her down. And the fun is just beginning, it seems, as there’s so much more yet to learn once we open the project for public editing.

We have much left to accomplish before April, but MBDA’s participatory editing plugin is nearly ready for Omeka 2.0, and, with a bit of luck, the programmer will have successfully upgraded the dev site to 2.0 this weekend. Now that is progress to celebrate!

Just returned from an exceptional few days in Amsterdam, where the ESTS Conference was held last week. The Dutch are wonderful hosts. Without exception (at the conference and throughout Amsterdam), whether assisting with conference details, technology, or more touristic ventures, the people were gracious. My* recommendation: when you go, buy a tram pass and explore this beautiful city!

While larger conferences offer a wider sampling of digital scholarship, for me it was a genuine pleasure to spend a few days immersed exclusively in textual studies. Many of the talks were thematically consistent, focused on integration of technology within editing methods/editorial models and dedicated to exploring how our work as textual scholars is advancing and evolving in pace with emerging technologies. Among the highlights were talks describing significant potential for computer assisted paleographic analysis, interactive chronology of textual composition, data annotation, a CMS designed for and by editors, and editions which reflect careful (& honest - this should be obvious, shouldn’t it?) consideration of audience.

My own talk introduced MBDA’s participatory metadata editing model. The talk exposes MBDA’s in-progress work (as well as our open development model), and it was excellent to receive very good questions that anticipate the challenges of:

• crowd control
• how we might ‘game-ify’
• audience
• incentives for participation
• how we are acknowledging community participation

We’d been working through these kinds of issues prior to the conference, and our interdisciplinary project team has ensured depth and diversity of perspective, but – especially as we move ever closer to pre-launch testing (scheduled for Jan/Feb 2013) and our spring launch (April 18, 2013) – serious and critical feedback from experienced editors refines our project lens and improves not only the view, but how we see it. Dank u, ESTS.

*my son’s recommendation: NEMO.

Having worked extensively on MBDA this semester and having been especially vocal about project-related milestones during recent dinner conversations, it wasn’t entirely surprising when my son asked me to tell him a little more about MBDA and to explain the progress we’ve been making…

‘Why is it so important, mom?’ he wondered.

‘Two reasons,’ I replied: ‘Access and modeling.’

But I should step back a moment and note first that his fourth grade class had been talking about Henry Ford and had been studying Ford’s contributions to the automotive industry. When my partner Garrick (who also happens to be MBDA’s programmer) heard this, he drew him over, pulled up the MBDA dev site, and showed him letters from and photographs of Henry and Clara Ford. A very cool teachable moment.

Thanks to that interaction, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to explain later that it would be very difficult for him and his classmates in Pennsylvania to travel to the Berry College Archives in Georgia to read the letters written to and from Ford. But a digital collection like MBDA (open, freely available) creates opportunities for people from across the globe to access all kinds of letters and manuscripts and important documents –

And at the dinner table with a nine-year-old, a project like MBDA enables us to take a discussion of Henry Ford from the abstract to the concrete (Ford did, after all, donate autos and tractors as well as significant sums to the Berry Schools, and documentary and photographic evidence excellently illustrates this history).

The importance of modeling is more complex to a nine-year-old, but ours did appreciate that, in some very, very small way, kind of like Henry Ford’s assembly line, MBDA’s participatory editing model can be used to improve the processes of editing, accessing, and engaging with historical texts. And our guy: ready to sign up as MBDA’s first fourth grade editor.

It’s been a challenge to keep current here in the midst of MBDA development, but the MBDA project remains open throughout the dev process, and you can watch it unfold on the dev site and on Crowd-Ed.

among the many things i’m behind on is responding to a comment made in response to this great little MBDA summary published on EdLab. Here’s the comment; below it (apologies for the delay and hoping to get an Africa pardon) my response:

While the collection was at risk of physical deterioration, there seems to be no mention of whether there were additional preservation efforts beyond digitization.

I was also kind of surprised that they really didn’t discuss the imaging process at all, especially given that they were using student employees and fragile documents. I feel like they almost left out half of the process in their discussion.

Thanks for taking time to read about MBDA and to comment on the related Code4Lib project sketch! While the Code4Lib piece was intentionally written as a brief overview of our work in-progress, I appreciate your comment about document preservation. For me at least, underlying it are two essential aspects of Digital Humanities project development that demand further discussion: collaboration & the importance of recognizing digital representations as just that, representations.

While Garrick (the programmer) and I have been responsible for designing and developing MBDA’s technical infrastructure, we have worked closely with the Berry College Archivist and Library Director in considering issues of long-term preservation and access. And it’s especially interesting and important to me (a linguist who works primarily with historical manuscripts) to engage in dialogue and research about preservation with others whose expertise complements and extends my own.

MBDA has benefited from the expertise of a programmer, a historian, an archivist, a museum director and a museum curator, another linguist, and a librarian (and we’ve spent time dialoguing and working directly with the IT and networking staff from both Bloomsburg University and Berry College, since the project entails issues like hosting, data storage, and data migration). The diversity of perspectives and aims represented in our inter- and extra- disciplinary conversations and research is rich, but, more importantly, inflected in project-level decision making.

The Martha Berry Digital Archive (MBDA) is a digital archive, but it was borne of an urgent need to preserve the Martha Berry Collection (the material original), for which no other backup exists. While discussion of MBDA necessarily centers on our digital methodology (where we have something new to offer), in practice, our work – because it involves interaction with and representation of a material collection – also encompasses aspects of primary source preservation (where I’m not so sure we really have anything new to offer).

Thankfully, the Martha Berry Collection adheres to existing preservation standards for archival materials (e.g. acid free storage boxes, lignin free flat boxes, file folders) and is carefully maintained by experienced archive and museum staff. Unfortunately, even within the folders maintained within the many file boxes which comprise the collection, all of which are stored in a temperature-controlled archive environment, documents continue to deteriorate.

Some of this degeneration results from the care and condition of the documents (many of which exist on tissuepaper-thin leaves) prior to their careful preservation by the archivists at the Berry College Archives; many were simply stacked in boxes; some were housed in attics or basements (in the heat and humidity and bugginess of Georgia); and some even needed to be retrieved from the public after having been (yikes!) mistakenly discarded. To some documents had been fastened metal or plastic paper clips, resulting in lacunae and tears. And each time an original document is accessed and handled, it is placed at risk of further decline.

During the MBDA imaging process, not only have we had an opportunity to create high quality .tiff scans to serve as a collection backup (in addition to and separate from the digital archive), we’ve had an opportunity to remove clips from documents and to ensure that papers are laid flat within folders. But, because the Martha Berry Collection already complies with international preservation standards, there is little if anything further (within reason) beyond digitization (which reduces the frequency of document handling and thus reduces decline accelerated by handling) that we can do to extend the life of the physical collection.

As to the critical importance of distinguishing between a material (in this instance documentary) artefact and a digital representation of that artefact (a topic I’ve written a bit about here), MBDA is designed to provide a one-to-one correspondence between documents in the digital archive and their material exemplars precisely because we recognize that digitization achieves but a copy of, i.e. a version of (albeit an exceptionally good one) the original. And we want to ensure that even while leveraging a resource such as MBDA to access a document, we can return to the physical object itself any time doing so proves crucial to literary, linguistic, historical, cultural, or any other type of study. In other words, we haven’t fallen prey to the mimetic fallacy ;)

Even still, if those using the collection can access the digital archive in place of the original documents (and in doing so explore connections between documents, search scores of documents quickly and efficiently in ways never achievable via the material collection) and if MBDA can increase and enhance access to the collection [1] while minimizing the kinds of physical handling which result in deterioration, we maintain that we are supporting preservation.

Though the Code4Lib piece isn’t so much written to address the topic of imaging, I’d be glad to answer questions or to share more about our imaging process. We dedicated significant time to researching, discussing and selecting a scanner, identifying the acceptable image type (.tiff) for document backup and preservation (a preservation method we adopted in addition to and separate from the digital archive) and also derivative type (.jpeg) for web-based digital archive use. Designing the imaging workflow was demanding since it entailed modeling transfer of image files from Berry (where the documents are held) to Bloomsburg (where the digital archive is being developed), as well as composing the step-by-step imaging guide for students, testing the guide with students, and training students. but I think we mentioned all those general comments already, so I’ll add –

We also seriously considered concerns related to the unintentional, unwitting introduction of new artefacts during the imaging process (e.g. hair, shadows, creases) and this too is a topic of worth discussing further.

For what it’s worth (I’m not sure whether or not this point is implied in your comment, but I find it worth noting): I think the digital editing community would benefit from much more discussion of imaging. It’s foundational stuff, and if we get it wrong or even just a little off, we may just be building a house of cards…

[1] MBDA design and implementation is consistent with international preservation and metadata standards as well as those maintained by the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), as collaborative project planning early on identified DLG inclusion as a deliverable.