My first experience using the plugin was last year for an Introduction to Digital Humanities course at UT-Austin’s School of Information taught by Tanya Clement (also our advisor for this project — she goes into more detail about the project background here). Dr. Clement asked us to create an Omeka exhibit for a set of correspondences, including images of the original letters as well as TEI documents of marked-up content. It sounds simple enough, but there was a lot of frustrated graduate student Facebook posting going on in the days before the project was due as people ran into unexpected technical difficulties.

Overall, there seem to be two main problems with the plugin. For the majority of the documents, we couldn’t get them to format at all – the entire body of text would wind up in one large paragraph in miniscule font at the top of the page. In a few other cases, the document would format enough to be readable, but it wouldn’t pick up the finer details of the TEI tags. For example, <p> tags would result in paragraph breaks, but <sic> and <corr> elements wouldn’t display– so something like “<choice><sic>sndstorms </sic><corr>sandstorms </corr></choice>” would show up as “sndstormssandstorms” in the body of the text. Though this seems like a relatively easy XSLT fix, we imagine other fixes (even possibly this one) may not be so straightforward.

Throughout the project, Zane and I will be documenting our work here at the Scholars’ Lab blog. At the end of the semester, we hope to provide not only an update to the plugin, but also user documentation, including use case scenarios and templates.

We’re going to be seeking input over the next few weeks on how this plugin would work in an ideal world, and we need your help! Look for a more formal survey soon, but in the meantime, let us know your thoughts in the comments – what are you looking for in a simple, out-of-the-box TEI display tool?

The collaboration makes sense on many levels, but here are two that surface readily:

1. These are complex technologies that function in a complex social and cultural system. We can meet the development needs because we represent institutions with different institutional missions, different (though like-minded) communities, with different resources.
2.  Our students, who will seek jobs in which they work collaboratively in different institutional missions, from the perspective of different (though like-minded) communities, with different resources, must be prepared to meet these challenges within a network of a the wider DH community.

If we believe in a basic DH tenet that making is a theoretically framed activity that helps deepen our understanding of our cultural artifacts and our modes of knowledge production, we must instill, as Bethany so aptly articulates, ”a can-do, maker’s ethos” in students who will feel “empowered to build and re-build the systems in which they and future students will operate.” To further this cause, we must also instill a second basic DH tenet in our community of scholars, makers, and teachers: we must pool our resources, both technical and academic, and develop our technologies (such as the TEI and Omeka) and mentor our students, together.

Both Carin and Zane will blog regularly in this space as the project develops. Onward ho, ya’ll.

I love lists almost as much as I love agendas and program management in general. Here is a status update in list form for you, Dear Reader. And Team, please feel free to expand/clarify/correct the following:

1. We have finalized the texts we’re going to be uploading into Prism for first-round users. Today, some of us tested a few of the suggested “highlighting” categories with help from our low-tech friends: transparencies, markers, and photocopies. Ed, Brooke, Annie, and I will be reviewing and revising categories over the next few days, and the entire Praxis team is invited to test our new suggestions this coming week.

2. The development team met their latest milestone goal: authentication and authorization for the Prism site is a go! User accounts! Ding!

3. As Lindsay notes, the wireframes (and thus, for the most part, the user story), are finalized. Design wizzes (plural of wiz?) Ed and Lindsay have been rocking out on the front-end work: Ed continues to wow us with his aesthetic brilliance (see his “striptease” post of Jan 26), while Lindsay works on making the dream a reality via CSS/HTML.

4. We’ve been inspired by the recent trend toward internationalizing Ruby on Rails applications, and have nominated the most Continental of our Fellows, Alex, to the position of Internationalization Expert(-to-be). I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from him about this exciting new development in the near future.

5. Finally, on a more personal note: I continue to enjoy how much time I get to spend with my colleagues while we work toward a common goal. Collaborative ventures certainly pose some challenges that would be non-issues in individual project contexts, but I think we’re all benefiting from learning how to work not only with digital tools but also with one another. The Fellows’ lounge was busy busy busy today–and that’s the way we like it!

The above video shows the visual options offered by the model of the deck prism.

While the deck prism is recognizable as an object, its clarity and sharp lines make it a good source of abstract imagery for the site. The model also allowed me to experiment with reflections of the texts we chose as our three highlighting samples. The text was simply applied to a plane directly below the prism in the 3D scene, and the reflections changed on the fly based on the camera position. You can see part of the first line from “The Raven” reflected in one of the images below.



Finally, the last image shows the highlighter “palette” that we used for our wireframe. The boxes are mostly just placeholders, but the colors represent some of the options that came out of the deck prism, and I think the categories we chose for Edgar Allan Poe”s “The Raven” could elicit a thought provoking response from a crowd.

The most important product of our meeting was the project workplan timeline the team collectively created. I know that deadline-lovers Brooke and I feel six hundred times better about how the rest of this semester is going to proceed, but I think everybody is happier knowing exactly what needs to happen and when. I would only be exaggerating slightly to say that it was magical to watch the workplan take shape. Despite the fact that we’ve all been meeting weekly for an entire semester, as the project has progressed and the design team and programming team have been working more independently of one another, it has been difficult to see how everything fits together. But when we had to agree on deadlines for project milestones (when will we be able to display a text? when will user accounts be ready? when should the highlighting tool be functional?), designers and programmers had to engage in a dialogue about what each group would need from the other in order to meet these goals.

The meeting served as yet another reminder of how absolutely, impossibly lucky I am to be part of this program. As project managers, Brooke and I are ideally positioned to understand how the Praxis Program and our project Prism work as collaborative ventures. It is impossible for every member of the team to keep track of what each subgroup is doing at all times, but it is necessary that project managers do just that. I can’t wait to get my hands dirty! I’m sure I speak for both of us when I say that we are thrilled and honored by the trust our team has placed in us. We won’t let you down!

Brooke posted last week about seeking out ways to engage in collaborative work, and I want to point very quickly here to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. I attended DHSI last summer, and it certainly didn’t disappoint on the collaborative front. Brooke and I are both making the trip to Victoria this summer, and I’m sure she will only find more evidence there of what she’s seen so far as a graduate student in the humanities: seek collaboration, and you shall find it. If you’ve never been but always wondered, I highly recommend that you make this the year you join the (collective) fun!

The readings were extremely helpful (see the “Intro to Project Management” section of Praxis topics for our short list of most helpful resources), especially Brian Croxall’s ”12 Basic Principles of Project Management” and Sharon Leon’s “Project Management for Humanists.” Both articles stress the PM’s need to assess the viability/sustainability of a project before it’s begun, the importance of a clear and flexible workplan that is derived collaboratively and realistically, and the PM’s responsibility to manage and encourage frequent communication amongst team members and partners. Both articles also begin with a point that has been made quite frequently, but that has not necessarily been my experience as a graduate student so far: that humanities graduate students are not trained to work collaboratively.

While I wholeheartedly agree with Leon, Croxall, and most of the DH community that graduate education must be transformed to formally, explicitly transmit this kind of training to humanities scholars, for the sake of the individual scholar and the profession as a whole, there are many opportunities to work collaboratively as a graduate student, but they must be sought out and are often extracurricular and small-scale. I recognize that it can be very easy to become the scholar/hermit in a graduate program, especially because programs have not yet adapted to encourage collaborative research in the traditional sense (like a tag-team digital dissertation), but collaboration on the most basic level has been ingrained in my daily experience in UVA’s English department – from discussion in grad seminars that leads to new research, to collaboratively editing papers and personal statements with peers and faculty mentors alike, to extracurricular activities like the Graduate English Students Association and its conference committee (groups that require quite a bit of PM-type skills).

This is not the kind of training Leon and Croxall are calling for, but my graduate education (so far) has trained me to seek out opportunities to collaborate with others within the department and outside of it (in my work with Praxis and IATH, for example). I have to stress that I do not disagree with the inadequacy of graduate methodological training; if I did, I wouldn’t be a Praxis Fellow. But I think we can find the basic principles for collaborative research happening already on a very small scale, and it’s up to graduate students to make collaborative research a priority – that is, to find those opportunities, seize them, and ask their programs to support them. Pardon the lengthy post; I know I’m not saying anything new here and I may be totally off-base, but I thought I’d respond with my experience as a nascent scholar and even-more-nascent member of the DH community.

Book Two of the Iliad notoriously contains a list of nearly 190 place names and includes the 29 contingents and that make up the Greek expedition to Troy.  Before launching into an over 250-line catalogue of the leaders of the Greek forces and the number of their ships, Homer appeals to the Muses to aid him in this tour-de-force of memory.  Without their help, he says:

I could not recount their numbers nor name them,
Not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths,
And an unbreakable voice and a brazen chest within,
If the Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing
Zeus, would remind me how many came under Ilium.

The Catalogue of Ships that follows this invocation can be mapped as an itinerary, or more precisely, three itineraries that traverse most of Greece.  The theoretical basis for the project I am undertaking with the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library is already complete. In my recent book, Homer’s Trojan Theater (Cambridge University Press, 2011), I argue that Homer was able to recite the Catalogue by creating a mental journey that used the mnemonic techniques involving loci or places, well known from ancient rhetorical writers.  By envisioning a series of places, Homer could mentally walk – or sail – through Greece and produce a detailed catalogue. Our project will reproduce that journey by showing that the itinerary described follows the natural contours of Greek geography and the patterns of early Greek urban organization.

Mapping the Catalogue of Ships involves several steps.  “Least-cost path” GIS analysis by the Scholars Lab is revealing the terrain that must naturally be followed when taking a walking tour of the Greek mainland.  We are creating an interactive map that follows that path.  The Barrington Atlas of the Ancient World (2002) as well as the recent Historischer Atlas der antiken Welt (2007), The Homer Encyclopedia (2011) and the Pleiades Project, a collaborative database for ancient sites, have pinpointed locations for which we have evidence.  We will attempt to link the sites mentioned in Homer with archaeological material and useful bibliographies.  Finally, we hope to do in situ investigations by actually traversing the plotted itinerary at ground level to survey the terrain, and create extensive panoramic photography. Our main goal is to demonstrate that the arrangement of the Catalogue, far from a random list of place names, corresponds to the natural geography of Greece.  In cases where the position of a site is unknown or disputed, we hope that our analysis will provide plausible geographical and literary evidence to help identify its location.

Collaborators in this project include Ben Jasnow and Courtney Evans, two of my graduate students who worked with me on the Trojan Theater project and who are assisting with GIS analysis, under the guidance of Chris Gist and Kelly Johnston of the Scholars’ Lab. Wayne Graham and other members of the Scholars’ Lab R&D division are creating a presentational framework for our maps and text, and Jeremy Boggs is our lead designer.

Jenny Strauss Clay
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics

I think it’s brilliant the way that Praxis has been structured, with one training-intensive semester and the next semester spent – I’m assuming – in executing what we’ve been theorizing. That’s not to say that we haven’t done anything yet; we have produced the programming and design foundations for Prism that we will hammer down and build from in the months to come. There have been days in the grad lounge, though, when I’ve felt anxious about how much work there is left to do and how difficult it seems to reach concrete goals when our discussions usually raise more questions than they answer. But even if we spend our entire Tuesday mornings arguing/theorizing about what we think Prism should accomplish, our time isn’t wasted if it means Prism will be (1) a clearly designed tool (2) with a distinguishable thought process that (3) makes a specific intervention.

All of our discussions have addressed at least one of those three points without fail, so our mission in the months ahead is to channel our humanities-inspired zeal for theorizing into reaching the goals we set for Prism in September – mainly, that we want to produce a working, 1.0 version of Prism by the end of the academic year. To reach that final, rather intimidating endpoint, I’d like to suggest that the Praxis team begins the new semester by establishing (collaboratively, of course) some real, manageable, short-term goals for the coming weeks.

I’m beginning to recover from Winter Break Amnesia (I’m sure our first Praxis meeting tomorrow will quickly bring me back to reality), but I am looking forward to getting back to learning HTML and CSS, to our civilized theoretical arguments in the grad lounge, and to those glorious moments when we (with the help of the gurus) learn how to turn theory into praxis and bring Prism further into the light.

It can be easy to create an over-wrought logo when you devote a long section of time to it. As you push, pull and minutely alter an initial idea to make it different from a previous example, the result is often an amalgamation of too many ideas. Inversely, I have found that a logo I create quickly “works” best because the quickness of the stroke leads to a corresponding quickness of communication.

The group’s decision to pursue a logo that more clearly represented an actual prism gave the logo direction, but it also capped the logo’s level of abstraction. It was my hope however to see how far I could abstract the design without losing its representative quality. At its core, a prism is inherently a narrative object with an implied beginning, a transition, and a result. These three elements had to exist in the logo with a perceivable order. As for most things in a digital medium, the four possible changes could be shape, texture, scale and color. In the end, I could not use all of these elements as part of the transition without the narrative breaking down. The transition was therefore set for scale and color, and the “transition object” was simplified to contrast with the color and scale changes on either side of it.

I admit that logos and font choice do not make for the most entertaining reading, especially without visual examples (You readers will have to wait until we have a prototype of the site to see the logo.) That said, I wanted to note that the representative prism “narrative” option ended up completely changing my approach to the font for the prism logo. Initially, I looked exclusively at more stripped-down, modern, sans-serif fonts with the vaguest hint at a meticulous human hand in order to connote a sense of precision for the web application. However, after selecting the representative design of the prism and its narrow beam motif, the width of the sans-serif fonts seemed to dwarf the rest of the logo. I then began to look at fonts with bracketed serifs and long flat bases that invoked the shape of the thin horizontal lines in the rest of the logo.

Today’s meeting should offer us an opportunity to get all but the last details decided on for the logo. I am looking forward to hearing everyone’s reaction.

And cake.

In 2010 we threw open the Scholars’ Lab doors for folks to present geospatial lightning talks.  We were impressed by the breadth of GIS work ongoing across our community.

And lots of people came to hear these mappy stories.

And for cake.

Face it, you love maps.  We invite you to join our band of Virginia Mapheads as we celebrate World GIS day 2011 with a lightning-fast show of the world’s coolest geowork in the Scholars’ Lab on Wednesday, November 16 at 1:30pm.

Sadly, I know many of you don’t have the pleasure of working all day every day with maps and geodata, so treat yourself to a once-a-year map fix.  You know you deserve it!  And bring a friend.

Again, we have a compelling lightning talk lineup for 2011.

Your reward?  Two slices of our soon to be legendary 2011 GIS Day geocake to be revealed on GIS day!

2011 GIS Day Update

Over 70 folks enjoyed our 2011 GIS Day celebration in the Scholars’ Lab.

Speakers ranged from wily GIS veterans to those who’d recently started using geospatial tools.   Check the speaker list above to see the wide range of topics.

The Charlottesville CBS station sent their GIS Day team to cover the event interviewing Eric Johnson, Scholars’ Lab Head of Outreach and Consulting.

And we feasted on the already legendary Virginia-shaped geocake decorated with flags marking unusual place names.  All this was followed by delicious hot mulled cider.

Thanks to everyone who played a part in making GIS Day 2011 a mappy success!

Here’s a modest proposal for reforming higher education in the humanities and creating a generation of knowledge workers prepared not only to teach, research, and communicate in 21st-century modes, but to govern 21st-century institutions.

First, kill all the grad-level methods courses.

Kill them, that is, to clear room for something more highly evolved — or simply more fruitful — to take their place. Think: asteroids clobbering dinosaurs. Choking weeds ripped from vegetable gardens. The fuzzy little nothings and spindly cultivars in this scenario, squinting cautious eyes or uncurling new leaves into the light, are:

• those research methodologies and corpora (often but not exclusively gathered under the banner of the “digital humanities”) that address hitherto unanswerable questions about history, the arts, and the human condition; and
• the new-model scholarly communications platforms we can already recognize as promising replacements to our slow and moribund systems for credentialing, publishing, and archiving humanities scholarship and the cultural record on which it is based.

What do these critters need to grow up? The same thing our colleges and universities so desperately need: a generation of faculty and alternative-academic scholar-practitioners who have been trained to work in interdisciplinary contexts and who can not only take advantage of computational approaches to their own research, but who have been instilled with enough of a can-do, maker’s ethos that they feel empowered to build and re-build the systems in which they and future students will operate.

Although a small number of extra-curricular experiments (like the Praxis Program) and curricular interventions (like Michigan State’s Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool) offer new and concrete models for emulation, there’s little hope for wholesale, bottom-up, grass-roots reform of methodological training in the humanities. With vanishingly few exceptions, required first-year graduate methods courses are dinosaurs and weeds. Some are an abbreviated introduction to journals databases and the mysteries of inter-library loan. Others have little to do with research and production “methodologies” at all, and are instead a crash course in the jargon and en-vogue theories of a given discipline. The intra-institutional level of coordination in developing and teaching these courses, even among closely-allied humanities departments, hovers around zero. Within single departments, they are catch-as-catch-can, shaped almost wholly by the individual faculty who teach them (often as they themselves were taught a generation or two before) and sometimes vacillating wildly in content from year to year as instructors rotate to make more equitable the “burden” of a course generally construed as service. Is it any wonder they’re a mess?

And is it any wonder that we continue to produce graduate students unready to engage with new technologies and opportunities for interdisciplinary and computational work — baffled and frustrated at the conditions of the academic job market and its underpinnings in a dying scholarly publishing industry — and under-prepared for or uneducated about hybrid and non-traditional academic careers?

Here comes the asteroid we require. (And in offering a trajectory for it, I want to acknowledge my debt to conversations with participants in the Scholarly Communication Institutes held at UVa Library, with Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff, and with our Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities and Praxis Program students.)

Funding agencies, both private and public — like Mellon, Sloan, and (in the US) the NEH and NSF — should be approached by a respected humanities organization that itself possesses a mandate and a track record of inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration. I think here of groups like CHCI, the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes — especially in partnership with centerNet, its digital counterpart — or the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The organization should offer, with sufficient funding, to serve as a broker for a prestigious and competitive RFP (request for proposals). The RFP would would be issued to universities with core strengths in the humanities, adequate support for digital scholarship, and a desire — able to be expressed at the institutional level — to create broad-scale curricular change in the way graduate students are inducted into and trained for 21st-century humanities. Probably no more than 3 or 4 schools would win funding, which would be contingent on this:

• the planned, top-down, apocalyptic wiping-out — one academic year from delivery of the award — of existing graduate methods courses in (say) four to six core humanities departments;
• the formation of a small but representative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary team charged with creating the year-long common methods course that will replace them;
• a commitment by participating academic departments, in the light of the new common course, to re-think the training that they consider to be absolutely unique to their disciplines and to offer an avenue (1-credit classes? discussion groups? new approaches to departmental teaching or to comps and orals requirements?) for students to acquire it; and
• a rigorous program proposed for assessing and publicizing the successes, failures, and overall impact of the experiment, so that lessons may be learned across institutions and new programs inspired.

The common methods course would be required of all incoming graduate students in participating departments. Grant funding could could support staffing of curriculum design and assessment phases, offer incentives (including course release or professional development) for faculty participation, or pay for teaching assistants. The program would be designed and team-taught by its planning group, which should include faculty from relevant departments, representatives of the offices of deans and provosts, and — importantly — local #alt-ac professionals, trained in the humanities, but working as scholar-practitioners in R&D or academic support roles in libraries, labs, publishing units, and centers. It should also engage faculty from departments like CS and Architecture, whose students may not participate directly in the program, but who would have important lessons to share about research methods and collaborative practices.

As its primary focus, the course must cover current humanities research skills, corpora, and trends — both digital and archival or material. But it should also address issues like: intellectual property and open access; the intersection of scholarship with the public humanities; publishing, preservation, and scholarly communication; funding and material support for research and teaching; interdisciplinary collaboration; matters of credentialing and assessment (peer review, tenure and promotion), faculty self-governance; and the under-interrogated policies that cover and shape the humanities in the modern college and university.

This is a tall order — but we can no longer afford to produce humanities PhDs who have only a foggy notion of how universities work, and how they are impacted by external technological and social forces. The first time a humanities scholar encounters a budget spreadsheet or performs a calculation should not be when he or she becomes department chair. And no new member of the professoriate should feel utterly out of depth in decision-making processes that impact the teaching, research, and service mission of his or her institution. Likewise, the health of the humanities depends on our production of graduate students who do not simply replicate the faculty of yesteryear, but who are prepared to take uncharted paths in and around the academy, working together to fashion new systems and adapt the ones we treasure to altered conditions.

Graduate training in the humanities starts anew every year, on Day One. How, at a moment when we feel so much is at stake, can we allow it to remain so purposeless?

There is of course a problem in asking students to apply a binary they may not agree exists. However, would allowing a “combination” marker defeat the purpose of the exercise? In a sense this is a problem that is inherent in any cultural binary, but I couldn’t help wondering how this potentially useful application for Prism might work.

In the process of searching for a published example that might be applicable for one of the binaries stated above, I came to the conclusion that Prism might be as useful in a design context as an art-historical one. I looked through Print magazine’s 2010 regional design annual and noticed that the editors’ reasons for selecting the works in each regional collection were rarely specific or clearly observable. In many cases, three or four adjectives were deemed sufficient to loosely hold the collection together. These adjectives, when separated into Prism “markers” seemed to be excellent vehicles to analyze “art speak,” editing, and curatorship.

I was then struck by the idea that we could also use Prism to ask a group of students which images in a group seem more “Midwestern” in style versus “Far West,” and “Eastern” by selecting images from across Print magazine’s regional categories. For our exercise, we only had time too work with a single page, and I did not want to black out the studio locations on the captions, so I selected the Midwest section and asked the group to mark the works that exemplify what the editors of Print magazine called “Narrative,” “Organization,” and “Viewer Interraction.” The exercise went well, and without a lot of time to discuss the results here, I will wait until we have scans of our marked up texts and images.

I was tempted to have a marker devoted to “Art Speak” but that might be a little too snarky for a marker.

So here’s a little post in honor of our grad school gals: Scholars’ Lab Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities and Praxis Fellows past and present.

Jean Bauer
Beth Bollwerk
Abby Holeman
Dr. Wendy Hsu
Brooke Lestock
Randi Lewis
Lindsay O’Connor
Sarah Storti
Annie Swafford
and Dana Wheeles

Thanks for inspiring us all!

Ian McHarg

Ian McHarg was born around the industrial town of Glasgow in 1920.  After World War II, he came to the U.S. and started a career in city planning and landscape architecture.  He founded the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and is considered innovative for his notion that design should work with the landscape instead of fighting or changing it.  He has also been credited with coming up, in the 1960s, with the idea of map overlay which is a fundamental GIS technique.

So, what do Richmond and McHarg have in common?  Before I can tell that story, I have to tell this one.  When I was a young struggling grad student, I happened to be at work in the Urban Planning Department at VCU one summer day when a PhD student from the University of California, Santa Barbara — John Cloud — strolled in. He told a small gathering of a few grad students and professors the story of how during the Great Depression the economic conditions were similar to those we face now. There was a foreclosure crisis and banks were not offering mortgages.  In an attempt to get the industry back on track, the Federal Housing Administration looked for ways to estimate neighborhood risk for mortgages.  They looked for indicators to predict how neighborhoods would fare at future dates. In partnership with the Richmond Planning Commission (RPC), the FHA used Richmond as one of its major study sites.  Mr. Cloud showed us a report he pulled from the National Archives (NARA) called Statistical Data Relative to Housing and other Planning Matters.

December 1935 Version

This report, produced as early as 1935, uses a series of tissue paper overlays to show various themes.  A color, loose-leaf card stock map of rent by block is used as the underlay.  Mr. Cloud has found this report to be the earliest American example of the use of such overlays during his research.  He also found parallel lines of work going on in Germany during the same time period.   Please find John Cloud’s detailed article on this story here.  There may be older examples out there waiting to be discovered!

RPC report showing tissue paper overlay and card stock underlay

Rental map under housing study area map

Homer Hoyt

Another player in this drama, economist Homer Hoyt, was an influential researcher at FHA.  He wrote a book in 1939 about housing research techniques called The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities.

In that book, Hoyt demonstrated the value of techniques developed during the FHA’s neighborhood forecast research including the sector model and – you guessed it — map overlays.  He used mylar sheets in the book to do a series of overlays for Richmond, which is clearly a distilled version of the RPC report maps.

At right, all four of Hoyt's overlays together: Race, Age, Condition, and Rent

So, it wasn’t really Mr. McHarg who pioneered the use of overlay at all (sorry to all you landscape architects).  At least, the RPC, Mr. Hoyt, and German researchers did it some twenty-five years earlier.

On a related topic, in my recent correspondence with Mr. Cloud he informed me that the Library of Virginia (LVA) had another copy of the RPC report that was missing at least one overlay.  We agreed that I would scan the LVA’s copy and send him a copy.  In return, Mr. Cloud promised to get the missing pages from the NARA copy.  However upon further investigation, I have discovered that there are at least two versions of the document.  The NARA version is dated December, 1935, and the LVA version is dated January, 1938.  There are a few discrepancies between the versions and it is hard to tell whether they were produced with different overlays or whether some layers have been lost over the years.  Specifically, there are unique overlays in each document.  The following table is an inventory of the overlays for each document.

Mr. Cloud had concluded that purposeful reasons (i.e. a tear out) were to blame for the missing African American overlay from the LVA version of the RPC report. However, based on my comparison of the two different texts, I am not so sure.  I believe Mr. Cloud did not have all the information.  Did the 1939 version of the report originally have different overlays than the 1935 report?  Or were overlays removed/lost from each copy in the subsequent decades?   Of course, it wouldn’t be a surprise to find out that someone purposely removed specific overlays from the PRC report given the amount of revisionist history around Richmond.

Hoyt listed four factors (race, age, condition, and rent) in determining neighborhood risk using map overlays.  According to Hoyt’s analysis, we have race, specifically the number of African Americans, as a major indicator for forecasting neighborhood risk.  Is that enough to cement Richmond’s place in racial infamy?  Not quite.  However, much of his research went into a survey which concluded in a series of maps by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC).  The HOLC maps were used as proof of redlining,  as term coined by John McKnight in the late 1960s.

"Redline Map" of Richmond by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation

Undoubtedly, race — specifically the percentage of African Americans — played a large role in determining the hazard values for the HOLC maps.  The question is whether or not the HOLC maps caused institutional discrimination against African Americans after their production.  Amy Hillier, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, says no, at least not in Philadelphia.  According to her analysis, banks were giving mortgages in the redlined districts after the Philadelphia HOLC map was produced.  She surmises that the HOLC maps were not widely circulated outside the federal government and therefore were probably not known or used by lenders.  In fact, a majority of HOLC’s mortgages were in the hazardous end of their assessment scale.  However, Hillier does conclude that the FHA policies, which were formed partially from Hoyt’s research, were influential in the arena.  The legacy of these maps and policies must not be understated.

The University of Richmond has a excellent site that shows the HOLC map for Richmond and explains in detail the criteria and survey data used to determine hazard rankings of which presence of African Americans trumped all other factors.  The handwritten survey reports are shocking.

Next Steps

We have now finished the process of digitizing all the RPC and Hoyt overlays.  We next will do some geostatistical analysis to compare them to the Richmond HOLC map to see how well the data fit together.  I would also like to map the new mortgages and refinancing given from the 1940s to the 1960s, à la Amy Hillier, to see the rates in the different hazard zones of the HOLC map.  Jeremy Boggs, a historian in our group here at the Scholars’ Lab, has an interest in looking at the City of Richmond’s policies during this period to gauge how they were affected by Hoyt’s and HOLC’s research and maps.

GIS map showing overlay from RPC report and HOLC hazard areas

Article edited to make corrections to errors pointed out by Mr. Cloud in the comments section.

I’d like to propose that we think about what kinds of things we can learn through Prism. Thus far we have defaulted to describe our “colors” with tongue-in-cheek phrases like “Happy passages” or “Daddy Issues passages.” I may be wrong, but I don’t think we are truly trying to “map” happiness in literature.  To make this process more tangible for our group, I think we should make it a priority to decide on a sample piece of literature and at least two possible “colors” or “expressions” that we deem valuable as crowd-interpreted data. Some of the debate about using prism to “quantify” and “mine” literary expressions or feelings may diminish if we were had a more concrete problem we’d like to solve as an example. We will thus avoid thinking about Prism as a method for mapping “happy.” Clearly there is an aspect of prism that is designed to be “hands off” and allow the crowd sourcing to be less directed and therefore more “honest.” However, many of us are simply not comfortable sending a powerful robot into the world which could be easily told to shake its metal hands and help people draw spurious conclusions before we see an example of this robot saving kittens from trees and making life better for literary scholars. Think Schwarzenegger in the original Terminator versus Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2…

To do this, our Praxis team needed a project. We wanted it to be a fresh one, something they could own. It was important to us that the project only be in service to the program — that its intellectual agenda was one our students could shape, that they set the tone for the collaboration, and that — as much as possible — it be brand-spanking-new, free from practices and assumptions (technical or social) that might have grown organically in a pre-existing project and which we might no longer recommend.

In this inaugural year of the Praxis Program, the Scholars’ Lab, in consultation with some colleagues from UVa’s College of Arts and Sciences, is providing the central idea for the project. It’s just too much to ask that students new to digital humanities work invent a meaningful project from whole cloth on Day 1 of the program — especially one that, we hope, will make a meaningful intervention in the current scene of DH research and practice. That said, by the end of this year, our current Praxis team plans to have conceptualized a second project (or perhaps an extension of this one) to pass on to next year’s group.

Here endeth the preamble. What are we up to now?

This year, the Praxis Program is building a web-based framework, codenamed “Prism,” for collective marking of texts according to small and constrained (but flexible) interpretive vocabularies. Prism will enable visualization of those marks — made by many users on the same document — as zoomed-out, rainbow-like spectra. It will also (should we get so far!) allow for comparison and analysis of the results of users’ activity (that is, their collective attention paid to certain passages of text, and the categorizations they make of those passages) by treating them as input for the data-mining techniques we can apply against large corpora of digitized texts. In other words, Prism will be a blunt but very interesting and user-friendly tool for crowd-sourcing humanities interpretation.

The basic concept of Prism is, for me, an old one. It stems from conversations on categories of textual interpretation which I had as a graduate student at SpecLab and a post-doc working with Jerome McGann, and more recent discussions with Alison Booth in the context of her project to define and mark narrative structures in biographies of women. It also stems from a fond memory of some markup games I invented nearly a decade ago for my Media Studies students and my colleagues at SpecLab. These games and discussions fed into McGann’s “Marking Texts of Many Dimensions,” and Jerry and I spoke about our experiences of them last year, in response to a Scholars’ Lab talk on “N-dimensional Archives” by Julie Meloni. At SpecLab, we called this (quite complicated) thing “the ‘Patacritical Demon.”

The version of the Demon I presented to the Praxis team last week as an inspiration for Prism is simpler in scope and beholden more to the material and pedagogical than to the text-theoretical. I’ll say no more here than that the original game involved shared, Xeroxed page images, transparent overlays, dry-erase markers, a common interpretive prompt, and a moment in which somebody yelled “Stop!” and the transparencies were stacked up for discussion.

Members of the Praxis team will be describing their vision for the user interface of Prism in more detail as the weeks and months progress. In our early conversations, the whole team has seemed energized by the potential of the tool for classroom use. But it’s important to say that we’re not just replicating an offline pedagogical exercise in the browser.

Prism updates the concept in some important — and we think timely — ways, some of which are meant as interventions in the current scene of DH project development and conceptualization:

• We recognize that there’s a huge vogue for “crowd-sourcing” in the digital humanities right now, but have been feeling like there’s potential for much more interesting work in this domain. We don’t want to treat the “crowd” only like robots or mechanical turks — asking for transcription labor, or refinement of OCR output, as valuable as those products may be. What would happen if we could systematize, capture, and build collective interpretive energy — on shared understandings and unexpected disagreements?
• We also feel ready to build on design lessons from citizen-science/citizen-scholar projects, like those created by the Zooniverse group, to create a DH tool that appeals to the general public and is easy and fun and effective for pedagogical use. We’d like to be able to use Prism as a laboratory exercise for thinking about design and development in the public humanities, and on the relation of audience and user communities to the questions we can ask in DH research.
• Finally, in an era of mass digitization, we’re keen to engage with big data in the humanities. Once the basic framework for Prism is established, we want to be able to experiment with the flow between user-friendly input and “easy” and attractive visualizations (like our spectra) and the deeper questions that can be asked and harder information design problems that are encountered when we move into computational linguistics & text mining techniques such as sentiment analysis.

This is a tall, tall order — but neither the Scholars’ Lab staff nor our Praxis students are the sort to be attracted to an unambitious project. We hope you’ll follow along this year as we see just how far we can get, and what we can learn along the way.

• Bethany Nowviskie, “Where Credit is Due.”
• Stan Ruecker and Milena Radzikowska, “The Iterative Design of a Project Charter for Interdisciplinary Research.”
• Siemens, et. al. “INKE Administrative Structure, Omnibus Document.”

These links are also available here, but so that you, my reader, may easily follow my references (and explore for yourself) I resubmit them now. First of all, I would like to express my delight that, as Bethany put it in her blog post of the 24^th, “we are using the Praxis Program to experiment with an action-oriented curriculum live and in public.” That emphasis on “live and in public” had me searching back through the above-posted materials, specifically Ruecker and Radzikowska’s piece, as I thought about my blog post for this week. I recall nodding vigorously and perhaps even whisper-shouting “yes!” to myself in the library last Monday when I came across this policy, under the subheading “Professional dignity”:

“We will attempt to keep communications transparent, for example, by copying everyone involved in any given discussion, and by directly addressing with each other any questions or concerns that may arise.”

The prioritization of transparency, here meant to ensure that members of the project maintain healthy professional relationships, sounds like an excellent strategy. I would love to see something similar in our charter: it seems like an easy and probably very effective way to reduce conflict and encourage mutual respect. But I become even more excited when I imagine the “everyone involved” to include the general public—that is, you, dear reader. Ruecker and Radzikowska’s paper continues as follows:

“This policy of transparency is another simplifying strategy. If too much back-channel discussion takes place, it can become very difficult for everyone to understand what decisions are being made and why, especially on a geographically distributed team.”

The audience for this blog could easily be described as a “geographically distributed team” of commentators and interested parties. Though the central Praxis Program group consists of local participants who are fortunately able to get together every single week for two hours, we are very interested in sharing what we do—whether it succeeds brilliantly or fails just as brilliantly—with you. I feel exceptionally lucky to have been selected to work with this talented and enthusiastic group, and desire passionately to make this kind of thing happen for other graduate students.  What decisions are being made, and why? You, reader, should feel that you are able to answer these questions as we go along. I am sure that some kind of policy about public access was always intended to go into our charter, but here is my formal declaration of support for it. The more we put out there—the more publicly we do this thing—the better for our geographically distributed team. It might not always be pretty, but at least we’ll have a record of how, exactly, we got wherever it is we end up.

Last week, Jeremy called these blog posts “first-draft” components of the charter: it is a thrill to know that this is the beginning of our live and in public adventure.

—

Epilogue: Archiving was the other topic I wanted to write about, though with my relative newness to most things DH I felt less than qualified to do so in an intelligent way: I’m not exactly sure how it works. I would, however, like for us to talk about it as we consider what will go into the charter.

Did you know that Charlottesville once had streetcars?  Since moving to town, I’ve heard tales of the once-thriving transportation system that connected Fry’s Springs, UVa and downtown.  It wasn’t until an inquiry came in from a student looking for GIS data for the system that I investigated it.

Mules pulling streetcar on Main St. - Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

I first found the following 1890 map which shows the holdings and plans for the Charlottesville Land Company.  The map highlights the existing streetcar system and plans to extend the system into their new neighborhoods.  We also found a large number of streetcar-related images from the Holsinger Photo Collection.

Charlottesville Land Co., 1890 - Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

The Charlottesville Land Co. map is intriguing.  Not only does it show the eventual street grid for Belmont and Rose Hill, it has unrealized plans for the southwest quadrant of the city.  The extensive streetcar plan designed to service these new developments piqued my interest. After a little research, I found a book called “Forward is the Motto of Today”: Street Railways in Charlottesville, Virginia, 1866-1936 by Jefferson Randolph Kean.  The UVa Library has two copies, one in Special Collections and one in general circulation.  The book gives the entire history of the rail system from its modest beginnings with mule-drawn cars down Main St. to an extensive electric system.  One of the best qualities of the book is that it has maps drawn by the book’s publisher, Harold E. Cox.

Charlottesville streetcar system 1891 from "Forward is the Motto of Today": Street Railways in Charlottesville, Virginia, 1866 - 1936 - H.E. Cox, reproduced with permission

The 1891 map shows the main trunk line which connects the UVa Corner to the C & O station on the east end of downtown via Main Street. Notice the Fry’s Spring R.R. line from the train station area to the Hotel Albemarle.  This line was eventually abandoned and replaced with one following the Jefferson Park Avenue route.  The Belmont R.R. line servicing “The Grove” (now Belmont Park) was also later abandoned.

Charlottesville streetcar system 1895 from "Forward is the Motto of Today": Street Railways in Charlottesville, Virginia, 1866 - 1936 - H.E. Cox, reproduced with permission

The 1895 map shows planned expansion to Woolen Mills, Fifeville, and 10th and Page neighborhoods.  The section downtown (South Street, 1st Street, and Market Street) that was built but abandoned is particularly interesting.  The entire section was never more than two blocks from the main line which probably explains why it was removed.

Charlottesville streetcar system 1920 from "Forward is the Motto of Today": Street Railways in Charlottesville, Virginia, 1866 - 1936 - H.E. Cox, reproduced with permission

The 1920 map shows an expansion through UVa to service Lambeth Field and down Jefferson Park Ave. to Fry’s Spring.  This map also depicts the “pass-bys” (represented with the double lines in five locations), car barn (on Ridge St.), and turn-arounds at the end of all the lines.

GISing the Data

Reviewing Kean’s work and other maps led me to some interesting questions.  What exact streets did the trolleys use?  Are any of the facilities remaining?  If the Charlottesville Land Co.’s streetcar plan was implemented and still existed, how many Charlottesville citizens would be served?  How do you answer these questions?  Here is where GIS can help.

Steps in spatial analysis:

1. Georeference the maps.  Georeferencing is the process of taking scanned maps and geolocating them - generally through the use of control points – for use in GIS or other tools.  Check here for more information.
2  Digitize the relevant features using the ArcMap editor.  More information here.
3. Perform spatial analysis.  In this case, creating a service area around the lines using 1/4 mile buffer.  That distance is considered a serviceable walking distance.

Georeferenced Charlottesville Land Co. map

The above image shows the georeferenced Charlottesville Land Co. map with 40% transparency overlayed on an Open Street Map (OSM) layer.

1920 map with OSM base map

This copy of the 1920 map was the first one I acquired using a handheld camera (opposed to scanning as with the other version).  Notice my fingers in the lower left holding the book open.  While nowhere near optimal, this shows that even poor quality photographs of maps can be georeferenced with decent results. Once all the maps were georeferenced, I was able to digitize all the pertinent streetcar system features.  I chose to show all lines from the maps including conceptual, planned, and abandoned.  I also included all the pass-bys, turn-arounds and support buildings including the electric generation plant on the Rivanna River near Woolen Mills (not on the map above but found using aerial images).

Digitized Charlottesville streetcar system overlayed on modern aerial imagery

The above map shows all the streetcar routes, realized or otherwise.  It includes all the system features except the power plant adjacent to the Rivanna River.  A PDF showing the full extent of the system (with the ability to toggle layers on and off) is available here.

So what if the Charlottesville streetcar system was fully realized and still existed today?  How many Charlottesville citizens would it serve?   Using spatial analysis techniques, we can answer that question.  To do this, I downloaded the 2010 census population counts and joined them to a block-level boundary layer.  I then created the walking buffer of 1/4 mile around the streetcar routes.  I then aggregated the census blocks within the buffer to get the answer.

Proposed Charlottesville streetcar system with 1/4 mile service area buffer overlayed on 2010 census blocks

The above map shows the full streetcar system in black with the service buffer around it in red.  The background is the 2010 census blocks.  Notice the two donut holes and the white areas.  The white areas in the map are Albemarle County.  At this point, we are only interested in city residents.  However, if you wanted to get the full extent of the service population, the UVa Grounds would have to be included (the eastern section of the service area is mainly over the river and unpopulated areas).  The next step is to use a technique called a spatial join to aggregate the total population for each block to the streetcar service area.  More on that here.

Showing attributes of spatial join aggregation

You can see by the last column in the above table that the streetcar service area covers around 33,267 city residents.  I say around because any block that intersected the service area buffer boundary was counted in full even though a percentage of people living within that block may not be within the buffer.  Using our block level tabular data, we can gather some basic statistics including total population for the city.

Using the basic statistics feature in ArcMap

The 2010 total population for Charlottesville is 43,475 which mean that approximately 76% of the city’s population would be served by the the streetcar system.

Some More Pictures

The Holsinger Collection in the UVa Library’s Special Collections has many great pictures of the streetcar system.  Here are some of my favorites along with a few other images.

Streetcar near Rotunda - Holsinger Collection - Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

Main St. looking east, electric street car about to pass Christian's Pizza (third full building on the right) - Holsinger Collection - Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

Looking north towards power plant, Rivanna River on the right

Working on the tracks, looking north up JPA Extended - houses in background exist today - Holsinger Collection - Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

Troops marching north up Rugby along tracks, Fayerweather Hall on the left, Mad Bowl on the right - Holsinger Collection - Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

Ridge St. with car barn in background, bridge over tracks and church exist today, car barn now the Greyhound station bus entrance - Holsinger Collection - Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

Installing tracks on University Ave. near the Corner - Holsinger Collection - Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

Of course once you know where to look, evidence of the streetcar system is around.

Intersection of University and Rugby looking southeast

If you look closely in the crosswalk there, you can see the old track as it turns off University Ave. onto Rugby Ave.

Closeup of exposed streetcar track in crosswalk across Rugby at University