DH at Dickinson, 2019

We are now five years past the period of the $700,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation that spurred a good amount of new digital humanities activity at Dickinson and strengthened existing projects. The Dickinson projects, it seems to me, are in various ways good examples of the pursuit of humanistic goals using digital means. They help put the humanities in Digital Humanities. DH, of course, means various things to different people, for example:

  • the use of databases for literary analysis, distant reading, the computational humanities project of running computer programs on large corpora of literary texts to yield quantitative results which are then mapped, graphed, and tested for statistical significance
  • natural language processing and machine translation
  • online preservation and digital mapping
  • data visualization and digital publishing

What most of these things have in common is the use of large datasets and computational methods to try to understand human cultural products. There has started to be a substantial backlash against this kind of work. To some, the phrase digital humanities may even appear a contradiction in terms. The digital values large data sets of often messy and imperfect information, speed, and countability.  Humanistic ideals of exacting scholarship, searching debate, high-quality human expression, exploration of values, and historically informed critical thinking may seem incompatible. Nan Z. Da recently found a receptive audience when she surveyed computational approaches to literary texts and found them lacking.

When you throw social media in there, the digital seems like a positive threat to the humanistic. Jill Lepore speaks for many in her recent history of politics in the United States, These Truths, when she identifies a new, digitally enabled model of citizenship, “driven by the hyperindividualism of blogging, posting, and tweeting, artifacts of a new culture of narcissism, and by the hyperaggregation of the analysis of data, tools of a new authoritarianism.” She sees the Internet as having “exacerbated the political isolation of ordinary Americans while strengthening polarization on both the left and the right, automating identity politics, and contributing, at the same time, to a distant, vague, and impotent model of political engagement.” (p. 738) Digital media have taught us anew how to like and be liked, she points out, but also how to hate and be hated.

Despite these malign trends it is quite possible to pursue, promote, and defend the humanities in the new medium, and it is being done right here at Dickinson, in projects like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Resource Center (Jim Gerencser and Susan Rose); Jim Hoefler’s “Caring During Serious Illness: Advice from Caregivers”; House Divided, the Civil War history site overseen by Matt Pinsker; and the project I direct, Dickinson College Commentaries.

Humanities goals include:

  • historically informed critical thinking
  • self-knowledge in line with prior understandings, the exploration of values
  • the cultivating of powers of thought and expression, including civil and substantive debate

Historically informed critical thinking

Tens of thousands of young people from Indian communities all across America were sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania between 1879-1918. What was the purpose, the strategy, the outcome? What can we learn from interrogating this historical, educational experiment about the goals of its founders, the students who were sent there, the impact on their families and communities, U.S. military and domestic policy related to Indian tribes, the history of American education, about race and ethnic relations? The CIIS site gives you the tools to do this, from massive troves of digitized documents and photographs, to teaching modules for various levels, including close reading modules that teach how to interpret documents and discuss them productively.

The House Divided Project aims to bring alive and explain the turbulent Civil War era in American history.  Using Dickinson College as a both a window and a starting point, the House Divided Project hopes to find in the stories of thousands of individuals a way to help illustrate how the Civil War came, why it was fought so bitterly, and ultimately how the nation survived. The site provides thousands of documents, photos, and records of individuals to sift through, and provides guidance in the form of key themes such as Civil Liberties, the Dred Scott case, Ft. Sumter, the Gettysburg Campaign that link out to the records of places, people, documents, timelines, and images.

Self-knowledge in line with prior understandings

Most patients who live with serious illness (and their family members) will typically need to make a number of important decisions about the kinds of medical treatment that is provided in this time. Hoeffler’s Caring During Serious Illness site is devoted to providing patients and their loved ones with advice about these decisions, offered by Clinical Advisors whose unique perspectives derive from devoting  their professional lives to caring for patients with serious illness. The site gives you interview excerpts from dozens of advisors from different medical specialties, different faith traditions, with the aim to help us care for aging relatives in a sensitive and kind way, and to give us ways of thinking about death, to help us understand it for ourselves. Rabbi Feinstein, for examples says, “Death the most frightening thing in life. The only thing that is more powerful than the fear of death is gratitude for the blessings of life.”

Cultivated powers of thought and expression

Dickinson College Commentaries presents commentary and annotation on classical texts that guide readers through understanding and appreciation. We try to model humanistic reading practices and to infuse good teaching into the site: not too much information, close reading, provide varying perspectives. The Chinese sister site Dickinson Classics Online focuses on intercultural understanding, with Chinese commentaries on Greco-Roman classical texts, and (soon) Latin and English commentaries on the Chinese classics.

Two areas are in my opinion being neglected by DH scholars, here and elsewhere: translation and podcasting. If you want humanities to be global, good translations are crucial.  Literary translation on the open internet is abysmal, and this needs to change. Dialogue and debate are crucial to the humanities, and podcasting is absolutely golden opportunity to model humanistic dialogue and publicize humanities research. Edward Collins’ Kingdom, Empire and Plus Ultra: conversations on the history of Portugal and Spain, 1415-1898 is a great example.

The world needs historically informed critical thinking, high quality expression, and self-knowledge in line with prior understandings. The world needs the humanities. Our political system is in crisis for lack of a culture of democratic discussion. Social media seems to be doing everything it can to crush our capacity for understanding and dialogue. We have the digital tools to promote humanism. Dickinson is leading the way, and I am proud to be working among the scholars, librarians, and teachers who are creating these fine resources. 

Rise of Rome, historical simulation using Civilization V

In the year 264 BCE, Rome sent a military force across the Straits of Messana to intervene in a dispute between Carthage and Syracuse. This military action, a prelude to Punic Wars, represented a fundamental change of direction in the course of Roman history and capped a crucial period of expansion. Five centuries earlier, Rome was nothing more than a collection of huts on a hill near the Tiber river and its salt beds. By the time the Romans sailed for Sicily, they had mastered the Italian peninsula and invented a system of political subjugation, population control, and military calculation that would eventually make them masters of the known world.
The year 264 also marks a shift in the security of our evidence and understanding of the course of Roman history. From that point onward, we have more and more valuable and trustworthy sources, but before that time our tradition is, as Mary Beard says in her recent history SPQR, “based on garbled hearsay and misunderstood myth—not to mention the propagandist fantasies of many of the later leading families at Rome, who regularly manipulated or invented the ‘history’ of the early city to give their ancestors a glorious role in it.” Our most important ancient source for the period is the Ab Urbe Condita of Livy, who composed his history during the principate of Augustus (27 BCE–17 CE). Originally, the work covered the history of Rome from its legendary beginnings, Aeneas’ flight from Troy, to his own era, the death of Drusus in 9 BCE. Of the original 142 books, only 35 have survived: books 1-10, which cover Roman history from its mythical beginnings to 293 BCE, and books 21-45, which cover 218-167 BCE. While Livy is a valuable resource for understanding the history of this time, and while the study of archaeology and the material record have supplemented our literary sources to a degree, there is still much we do not know or understand about the story of how Rome came to dominate the Italian peninsula by the middle of the third century BCE.

To understand the early history of Rome, then, we must closely scrutinize and creatively manipulate every precious piece of evidence we have, and this project was intended to do precisely that. We proposed to create a simulation of the expansion of Rome throughout the Italian peninsula using the game Civilization V. Grounded on thorough research into the primary literary sources, the material record, and recent scholarship, the finished simulation presents the gamer with a more historically accurate representation of the history of Rome.
Our team consisted of research intern Ian White, coding intern Catalina Ionescu, research advisor Scott Farrington, and coding advisor Todd Bryant.

We expect several concrete outcomes from the project. First, we hope that the general public and the Civilization gaming community enjoy the modified game and through gameplay gain a basic understanding of the history of the period. Furthermore, we intend to integrate the mod into the Introduction to Roman History course at Dickinson College. Furthermore, we hope to present the results at upcoming digital humanities conferences.

We hope that by developing an innovative and creative way to interact with early Roman history, we have opened new avenues of inquiry into a historical question that is current, by no means settled, and often overlooked.

Read the entire ReadMe file documenting the research – http://bit.ly/DickinsonRiseOfRome 

Download via Steam – http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1091032377

Screenshots:

WorldBuilder map

Opening Screen Game Map Puppet City Options

Words Take Flight

DICKINSONIANS DIGITIZE LETTERS FROM THE FRONT AND HOMEFRONT TO OFFER A 360-DEGREE VIEW OF WORLD WAR II.

by MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson

When hundreds of Japanese fighter pilots attacked a Hawaiian naval base on Dec. 7, 1941, they steered a two-year conflict, distant to many Americans, onto U.S. soil. Ralph Leland Minker ’47, a first-year history major at Dickinson, had just finished a roast beef dinner and was on his way to Conway Hall when he heard the news.

“At first there was a period of intense excitement and anxiety: What was going to happen?” Ralph—known as “Lee” to his family—later wrote. “After the New Year, a nervous calm prevailed but war became more real.”

This snippet is from just one of hundreds of letters Ralph penned to his family from 1942-45, chronicling his journey from undergrad to World War II commander and bomber pilot. Together with hundreds more mailings from his parents and sisters, the letters provide a vivid account of the war, viewed from battleground and homefront alike.

Two generations of Dickinsonians

The Minker family’s story begins at Dickinson, where Ralph Minker Sr., a senior in the class of 1920, met Edna Jones, class of ’24. They married three years after Ralph Sr.’s graduation, and Ralph Jr. was born in 1924. Shirley followed in 1926; Bernice, in 1928.

The Minkers settled in Wilmington, Del., where Ralph Sr., a Methodist pastor, also worked as a reform school superintendent, and for a decade, the family lived on school grounds. Ralph Jr. was a high school class president and, despite his small frame, played second-string quarterback. He arrived at Dickinson at age 17 in the fall of 1941.

Too young to enlist when America entered the war, Ralph volunteered for a military preparation program on campus that included accelerated classwork and rigorous phys-ed courses. Fourteen months later, he’d completed three semesters of credits and was ready to ship off to Florida for basic training.

Getting his wings

That train ride south was an adventure for the 18-year-old, who’d always wanted to travel, but had only ventured about 125 miles from home. And within just a few months, Ralph saw another boyhood dream come true when he climbed into a cockpit and learned to fly.

“There seems to be nothing at all around you—you’re floating in midair, but with the awful roar of the Franklin 65 H.P. engine in your ears,” Ralph wrote home from flight camp in Nebraska. “The ground looks just as if it were a picture by Stephen Curry.”

Ralph went on to pass his flight tests with flying colors, “feeling rather cocky,” he wrote from the classification base in California where he was stationed along with Joe DiMaggio. By the time he was assigned his B-17 crew, however, the weight of responsibility was beginning to sink in. “I hope I’ll make a good leader,” he wrote to his father. “Now is when it counts.”

Dispatches from the homefront

Ralph Sr. sent his son encouragement, advice, Dickinson updates, baseball scores and news of his anxious congregation and dwindling school staff. He also discussed his role as civilian defense warden, organizing government bond fundraisers, purchasing air-raid sirens and addressing jammed phone lines when too many soldiers called home.

When Ralph Sr.’s secretary joined the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) reserve, Edna filled in. In June 1943 she wrote to her son, “Maybe you will be surprised to learn that your mother is a ‘working lady’ now.”

Writing twice-weekly letters on the school typewriter, she provided church and family news and work gossip; she also sent packages of cookies and hard-to-find items, like film.

As Shirley finished high school and began college, she saw many friends leave for war. She wrote to her brother of military leaves and school goings-on, including an informal and female-dominated prom.

In between jokes and news, Bernice discussed a program to keep soldiers’ farms afloat, a teacher who joined the Red Cross, the scarcity of Hershey bars and a school air-raid evacuation in December 1943: “I had to get all of the ‘Ag’ boys in from outside. They were in the chicken house, and if you know what bedlam is, you can well imagine me trying to holler, ‘Air Raid, follow Plan B,’ over the chickens’ protesting clucks.”

 

A close shave

Ralph received his wings and commission as a second lieutenant on March 12, 1944. After co-piloting two missions, the youngest member of the 447th Bomb Group was ready to take command of his own crew.

Ralph went on to aid battles in Rhineland, the Ardennes region and central Germany flying 15 missions in support of ground troops during the Battle of the Bulge. His most nail-biting moment arrived when he nearly ran out of gas after bombing a Berlin train station and landed the B-17 on little more than gas fumes. Ralph was promptly inducted into the “Lucky Bastards Club,” reserved for those who flew 35 successful missions. He also earned the distinction of being the youngest 447th pilot to complete a 35-mission tour.

When V-E Day arrived, Ralph sent news of “the joy and thanks deep in the hearts of those of us in the service,” while his father wrote about “how the Nazi ideology could so completely grip people … the ‘spanking’ we have given them is just the beginning of the work necessary to a changed point of view.” The Minker women’s letters were less introspective. Edna focused on her son’s safety, his sacrifices and work yet to do, while Bernice was outright unimpressed: “I rather expected shouting and parades, but it’s just another day when we sit with ears glued to the radio, hoping for news.”Although his job was officially over, Ralph volunteered to stay on and fight, much to Edna’s dismay. By war’s end, he was a captain with an Air Medal and five oak leaf clusters, and he’d flown 37 missions—all before age 21.  

Memorializing a life of service

Ralph set sail for home on the HMS Queen Elizabeth, playing cards with fellow pilot Jimmy Stewart during the voyage. He returned to Dickinson and graduated with his history degree in 1947, followed his father’s footsteps to Boston University of Theology and was ordained in 1951.

Two decades later, after serving 11 churches and raising two children with first wife Peggy Ann, Ralph launched a career-counseling business. He married Sandra O’Connell in 1980, and they lived in Reston, Va. After Ralph’s 1995 Alzheimer’s diagnosis, he and Sandra decided to donate the family’s 656 WWII letters, recognizing their value to history.

The originals are housed at the Delaware Historical Society (DHS), with copies in the Dickinson archives; Ralph and Sandra also co-published a 2005 book about the collection with historian Harry Butowsky. In 1999-2000, Patrick Stevenson ’01 conducted an oral history of Ralph, published on the Dickinson website; they remained friends until Ralph’s death in 2008.

Last year, Sandra spearheaded a project to digitize the letters, with additional support from her sister, Sharron E. Juliano, and the Ralph Minker Peace Fund for Student-Faculty Research at Dickinson College. Patrick Kennaly ’17, a double major in history and Russian, helped prepare letter abstracts through a Dana Research Grant-funded project led by Associate Professor of History Jeremy Ball. The Minker family collection was made available on the DHS website last spring.

“Reading the letters was quite a privilege for me, especially as a history major, as I was able to work with such a large collection of primary sources that were very personal to the family,” said Kennaly, who was struck by the letter-writers’ distinctive tones.  

As Sandra notes, the online collection invites people worldwide to discover “not only the history of World War II, but also the values of doing your duty, love of country and family and shared sacrifice,” and she’s already tapped the online resource to help teach students about history and the value of letter-writing. Sandra is working with the DHS to develop online resources for further educational use.

“This is a legacy that is continuing to share the values of the generation that won our freedom,” she adds. “Seventy years later, young people are learning about the war and the people who lived through those days through these letters.” 

Learn more

Published January 16, 2017

How far will core vocabulary get you?

One of the claims that scholars make about vocabulary acquisition in Latin and Greek is that a relatively small number of high frequency lemmas (dictionary headwords) accounts for a high percentage of word forms in a typical text. John Muccigrosso and Wilfred Major, for example, estimate that the number of lemmas that will generate 80% of a typical text in Latin is 1500, in Greek, about 1100. (Muccigrosso, 2004, p. 416; Major, 2008, p. 7). Of course it stands to reason that this figure will differ between texts, and within texts, since some authors use relatively simple vocabulary (Nepos, Lysias), while some do not (Juvenal, Aeschylus), and some passages within an author have more unusual words than others. I and others have long wanted a way to calculate the “core percentage” in a given piece of text, that is the number of word forms in a section of a text that derive from high frequency lemmas. This would be both interesting from the point of view of literary criticism, and helpful pedagogically. Some data on that is now emerging in the case of Latin, thanks to the work of LASLA, of Bret Mulligan and his Bridge application, and the Excel skills of Derek Frymark (Dickinson ’12). If we take the 1000-word DCC core Latin vocabulary as the definition of high frequency lemmas, then 78% of Caesar’s Gallic War consists of core lemmas, excluding proper names. The core percentages by book in Caesar’s Gallic War look like this:

Book      Percentage

1             0.80

2             0.78

3             0.77

4             0.79

5             0.77

6             0.78

7             0.75

Individual chapters range from a high of 100% (7.61) to a low of 57% (7.72).

In the Aeneid (taking the chunks of the text as presented in Perseus) the average is 70% core, with a high of 88% (7.1–4), and a low of 46% (6.417–425).

Two Dickinson students, Seth Levin and Connor Ford, are working on visualizing the core percentage data for the Aeneid and the Gallic War as part of Dickinson’s Mellon-funded Digital Boot Camp, led by Patrick Belk, starting this week. I look forward to sharing the results in the next few weeks, and hearing what you think of them!

References

Major, Wilfred E. (2008). It’s Not the Size, It’s the Frequency: The Value of Using a Core Vocabulary in Beginning and Intermediate Greek. CPL Online, 4.1, 1-24.

Muccigrosso, John (2004). “Frequent Vocabulary in Latin Instruction.” Classical World, 97, 409-433.

January Digital Boot Camp for Dickinson Students

Student applications to Digital Boot Camp 2016 are due Friday, November 20, at 5:00 PM. Please invite students who may be interested in this two-week, paid opportunity. This year’s program includes an all-day “humanities hack-a-thon,” and the theme will be “Humanities at the Crossroads of Tradition and New Technologies.” The application form is available on the website, DBC 2016.

Out of the dozens of applications we received last year, eleven students were accepted into Dickinson’s Digital Boot Camp held in Waidner-Spahr Library (January 12-16). Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Dickinson’s Digital Boot Camp 2015 was a two-week series of tutorials and on-campus workshops designed to help students develop the skills to produce and display, organize, and analyze digital content and information online.

Based in current Web technologies, students learned fundamentals of using Drupal (CMS) to design and display content, ArcGIS (Geographic Information Systems) for identifying and analyzing geographic relationships in humanities-based research, and Gephi (an open-source data visualization software) for mapping large complex sets of data for visualization, discovery, and network analysis.

This year’s upcoming program (January 11-22, 2016) will mark the third anniversary of DBC @ Dickinson, and be the first in which students have the opportunity to interact in Waidner-Spahr Library’s two new digital humanities workspaces, the Willoughby Digital Scholarship Lab and the <TEI Lab/>. Here they will be learning last year’s application technologies in addition to XML encoding and the markup language of TEI, which support the next-generation Web technologies that are already shifting scholarship away from today’s Web of Display to tomorrow’s Web of Data and Meaning.

For an example of Web 3.0 collaboration in the humanities, see the ARC BigDIVA (Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application), a dynamic catalog of over 200 research projects in the digital humanities which students at Dickinson have been involved in building through textual markup of early 20th-c. magazines and internships in the <TEI Lab/> this year.

“The taxonomies we develop [through ARC] will be taken up by contributors to our nodes and could potentially become one of the standards for the semantic web. This is a big responsibility: we can at this moment have an impact on the way that literature is found on the Internet, not just by search engines but by data-mining and information systems that create encyclopedic definitions of the world. We are participating in the emergence of knowledge organization for the future, beyond Dewey and Library of Congress schemes.” — Dr. Laura Mandell, Professor of English, Texas A&M University, Director of ARC, 18thConnect and General Editor of The Poetess Archive.

Read what students last year are saying: Student Experience and Kristina Rodriguez’s Article from The Dickinsonian (Oct. 25, 2015); and learn more about the National Endowment for the Humanities and support for humanities computing, The Rise of the Machines

Patrick Belk

Dickinson Expands Digital Humanities Projects, Resources

[Reprinted from an article by Kristina Rodriguez ’19 (Staff Writer) in The Dickinsonian: The Dickinson College Student Newspaper, from October 15, 2015]

As the field of Digital Humanities grows in academia, Dickinson continues to integrate it into the curriculum, and is currently sponsoring training opportunities and a new Pulp Magazine digital archiving project.

The term Digital Humanities is inclusive of “a wide range of activities, from online preservation and digital mapping to data mining and the use of geographic information systems, data visualization and digital publishing,” according to the Digital Humanities Advisory Committee (DHAC) page on Dickinson’s website.

“Digital humanities considers the text, object and world in digital terms, explained Patrick Belk, the current post-doctoral fellow in Digital Humanities. “It acknowledges the ways in which scholarship, teaching and social activities are themselves increasingly digital and often taking place online.”

Belk is working on a few different projects in the Digital Humanities at Dickinson, including Digital Boot Camp and the Pulp Magazines Project.

The Digital Boot Camp at Dickinson College is a 10-day training program to teach students to be able to participate in the digital age more efficiently through digital tools and skills such as WordPress, editing videos and using Geographic Information Systems to make maps.

The program this academic year can take up to 10 students who would receive a $350 stipend, training materials and campus housing from Jan. 18 to 22. Interested students must apply by 5 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 20 to participate in the boot camp.

Rachel Kruchten ’16 attended Dickinson’s first Digital Boot Camp two years ago.

“I was recommended for the Boot Camp because I was working as the Digital Services Assistant in the library and had very little experience with digital technology, ironically enough,” explained Kruchten. “The overall experience of the Boot Camp was positive and gave me tools that I ended up using over the next two summers working on the Carlisle Indian School project. I have continued to engage with digital humanities beyond the boot camp, and I highly recommend it for other students as I think it has given me a better understanding of the integration of science, technology and the humanities, and I know the skills I have learned will be useful for me in the future.”

From last spring to the current semester, students have been working on Belk’s Pulp Magazine Project. Victoria DeLaney ’17, Harris Rissell ’16, Jenna Howdyshell ’17, Katie Lasswell ’17 and Edgar Estrada ’18 have contributed to the project thus far. The goal of this project is to complete TEI/XML P5 “mark-up for…the 320 magazines available on the Pulp Magazines Project website,” Belk’s personal project in Digital Humanities.

teiSummer2015_3

Belk is also collaborating with Vy Huynh ’18 this semester “to develop new and experimental search features, designed for exploring popular periodicals through their character-based, plot-driven fiction.”

Another project that Belk works with is the Humanities Lab, which is used to help students develop skills such as close reading, deep interpretation of text and critical analysis when conducting Humanities research. Students involved in this project “are building infrastructures for digital research and enabling increasingly sophisticated modeling of digital texts by adding layers of mark-up to facilitate more complex interactions between texts and computers,” Belk said.

The DHAC webpage also includes information about Digital Humanities projects with which students can get involved, such as: Russian Rooms, where there are photos of Russian citizens that individuals are able to read biographies on as well as listen to interviews and get a taste of the Russian culture; Eighteenth Century Poets Connect, a project to see relationships among individuals in the literary field in Britain during the 1730s; and Women’s Experiences at Dickinson College, a site meant for the women of Dickinson College to digitally voice their collective stories.

Frank Vitale ’16 interned over the summer in Oxford at Zooniverse, a research group that builds crowdsourcing platforms for science and humanities projects. The projects at Zooniverse “allow for people without specialized training to contribute to real research,” Vitale said.

“More students should get involved with digital humanism, and consider it as a serious and worthwhile academic pursuit,” Vitale said. “The political scientist, linguist, historian, philosopher, classicist, sociologist, archeologist, et cetera of old are being replaced by those who can use digital tools to innovate and expand their fields in new and previously unimaginable directions. The digital humanities truly are the new frontier for our generation of humanists, and those without the skills to keep up will be left behind.”

“In many ways, Digital Humanities is no different than ordinary humanities. We still read texts, tease out their meanings, interpret our results, analyze patterns and draw connections between them,” said Belk. “The main difference is that now we can do those things digitally.”

Willoughby Digital Scholarship Lab

Over the summer months, a space in the Waidner-Spahr Library was reconfigured to serve as a new computer room. Known as the Willoughby Digital Scholarship Lab, this room was created in response to a request from Prof. Francese, on behalf of the Digital Humanities Initiative, that there be some dedicated space where faculty members and their student interns may work on digital projects of various types. The Library has received similar requests for workspace for such faculty/student collaborative work in the past, so there seemed a clear enough need, and the Library responded.

Willoughby_Lab_1

The computers in the Willoughby Lab have been outfitted with both Mac and PC desktop computers as well as a variety of software applications, but additional software may be added as necessary in support of the specific research needs of faculty and students. There is also a new book scanner – a Zeutschel Zeta – that makes relatively quick work of any scanning project.

The Lab includes lockers so that materials may be stored securely. There are also shelves and cubbies to store other materials that may not need to be locked up – basic reference books and things of that sort. There is a table for meetings and small group discussion, and a large whiteboard.

Willoughby_Lab_4

Our temporary Library Digital Projects Manager, Don Sailer, has oversight for the room and spends much of his time working in the Willoughby Lab. He is able to provide basic assistance to any faculty members or their interns who may be pursuing their work there.

For more information about how you and your student interns may make use of this space, please contact Don Sailer, Library Digital Projects Manager, or Jim Gerencser, College Archivist.

–Jim Gerencser, College Archivist

Mellon DH Fund supports the creation and development of Urbanatural Roosting

By Ash Nichols (Walter E. Beach ’56 Distinguished Chair in Sustainability Studies & Professor of English)

My DHAC-funded Student-Faculty Summer Research Project (2015) was a complete success. My student researcher, Kerin Maguire, turned out to be a hard worker, an excellent researcher, and a writer with a prose style well in advance of her years. Over the summer, we produced a new website, Urbanatural Roosting: Planetary Living for the New Millennium, and wrote content for three (3) pages. Individual page links are included below the image:

unr

UrbanNaturalBibliography

These pages required extensive research—both library and online—as well as a wide range of reading from books, essays, and online materials. In addition, we added dozens of illustrations, often requiring permissions acquisitions, technical layout details, and digital design. We worked closely with the Dickinson Multimedia and I.T. staff to improve the look and technical details of the site as well.

Activities of Student Researcher

My student researcher, Kerin Maguire, was completely involved as a collaborator in every aspect of the work on our project. She researched, read, and wrote to at least the same extent that I did. In a number of instances, she was completely responsible for the addition of new material, from conception of the idea to all of the research, writing, and site design. In one instance, she even took her own photographs to illustrate the “Pine Barrens” section of our Natural Urbanatural Roosting page. Our page is her work as much as it is mine; this felt as completely collaborative as any student-faculty research project in which I have been involved. Even her academic plans for the coming semester—and two years—have been affected by our work.

Potential Long-Term Benefits of Project for Student

Kerin’s own words will form the basis for this part of our report. Please see the attached news story that appeared on the Dickinson Web-Page at the completion of our project:

Urbanatural Living, Digital-Style

The article clearly sets out a number of ways in which Kerin benefitted from our work together:

“It involved a lot of reading … Professor Nichols just kept handing me these stacks of books,” Maguire says with a laugh, “but now that I know a little more about this topic, I am interested and invested. It reels you in.”

Indeed, Kerin informed me as the project drew toward completion that our work had even had an impact on her future academic plans. She now wants to add environmental studies courses to her academic program as an English major:

As the weeks progressed, Maguire began to find connections to the work during non-research hours; an article in her hometown newspaper, for example, was the catalyst for her final post of the summer. She also uncovered environmental issues in familiar settings—in the pinelands of her home state, and along the fragile shoreline of Cape Cod, a favorite family-vacation spot, where the population has increased 400 percent in the past 40 years, creating significant pollution. “I go there all the time, and I never knew there was a problem,” says Maguire, who plans to keep contributing to the portal, at Nichols’ request. “Once you learn about statistics like that, how can you not want to share them with the world?

This is a perfect example of the way our project worked. I would assign a specific section of our web-portal to Kerin, or she would come up with her own suggestion, as in our “Cape Cod” entry or our “Artificial Reefs” section. One final quote from her will make clear the future benefits of our work together:

I have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge on the subject and am interested in finding ways to implement the concept of urbanatural roosting into my own life and that of my family. . . In addition to learning about fascinating subject matters, working closely with Professor Nichols improved my writing and research skills. . . I also improved my technological skills using WordPress, as well as editing and revising my work.

There is clearly nothing for me to add to Kerin’s own words in this regard.

Future Plans

Like my earlier website, Romantic Natural History: 1750-1859 (praised by the New York Times, the BBC in London, M.I.T., and others), the Urbanatural Roosting site will continue to grow over the coming years. I have assured Kerin that she is welcome to continue work on this resource at any time she would like. She is welcome to make additions to our existing pages or propose new cities for our Urban Urbanatural Roosting page or natural sites. I did the same in the past with students who worked with me on Romantic Natural History, and two of the three took me up on this offer and added to the site after their summer research assignment had ended. In addition, two of my research students have said that they got their first job after graduation at least partly as a result of being able to show their future employers the work they had done on our web-portals and web-pages.

Bryan Alexander visits Dickinson

Well-known and well-bearded Higher Ed. consultant and futurist Bryan Alexander returned to Dickinson this week to deliver a stimulating talk about economic, cultural, and technological trends affecting higher education. The seminar was integrated into the week-long Willoughby Institute for Teaching with Technology. Alexander’s talk was opened to the broader community as well, and the lively audience included representatives from surrounding institutions such as the Bosler Free Library, Bucknell University, and Messiah College. While the event was not recorded, the material he presented is based on his Future Trends in Technology and Education report, which is available here.

FullSizeRender FullSizeRender1

Dickinson Classics Online Seminar in Shanghai

DCCShanghaiSeminarGroupPhoto1

DICKINSON ESTABLISHES COLLABORATION WITH CHINESE SCHOLARS OF THE GRECO-ROMAN CLASSICS

By Chris Francese

Marc Mastrangelo and I traveled to Shanghai in June, 2015 to meet some leading Chinese scholars of the Greek and Roman classics, with a view to exploring possibilities for collaboration on a Chinese version of the Dickinson College Commentaries websites. Our contacts in China were made via Jinyu Liu, who is Associate Professor and Classics Department Chair at DePauw University, and also Shanghai “1000 plan” Expert/Distinguished Guest Professor at Shanghai Normal University, where she resides in the summer months. The conference was jointly sponsored and funded by Dickinson College, thanks to Dean and Provost Neil Weissman, and by Shanghai Normal University, thanks to Chen Heng, Professor of Humanities and Communications there. Participants included Liu Chun (Peking University), Chen Wei and Bai Chunxiao (Zhejiang University), Zhang Wei and Huang Yang (Fudan University), Xu Xiaoxu (Renmin University of China), Xiong Ying (Nanjing University), Zhang Qiang and Wang Shaohui (Northeast Normal University), and a contingent from Shanghai Normal itself: Kang Kai, Li Shangjun, and Yi Zhaoyin. Unable to attend but interested in the project were Li Yongyi (Chongqing University), and Michele Ferrero (Beijing Foreign Studies University).

The meetings took place in a seminar room in the humanities building at Shanghai Normal University. We were assisted by a wonderful group of SHNU students.

The meetings took place in a seminar room in the humanities building at Shanghai Normal University. We were assisted by a wonderful group of SHNU students.

Prior to the seminar itself Marc and I gave public lectures attended by students and faculty at SHNU. Marc spoke on June 9, on the topic of “Plato’s View of Poetry and the Early Christian Poets.” I spoke on June 10 on the topic of “Sebastian Brant: An Early Modern Editor of Vergil and Multimedia Text Annotation.”

The conference itself began on Friday, June 12. It started with a presentation from me on the topic “Digital Commentary on Classical Texts: Problems and Prospects,” which outlined the goals of the current DCC project within the context of unsolved problems of text annotation in a digital environment. I ended by emphasizing the collaborative nature of this kind of work, and urged the group to think about what kinds of resources are most needed for Chinese students and scholars. Throughout the seminar we talked with Chinese students as well, learned about their needs, and heard about current teaching practices and materials.

Friday afternoon we were treated to a field trip to see the Bibliotheca Zikawei (Xujiahui Library), a historic collection of western and Chinese books and manuscripts, including an impressive collection of Greek and Roman materials, gathered by the Jesuits and now maintained in their original setting by the Shanghai Library. Thanks to Prof. Chen we received rarely-given access to the sections closed to the public. (The library is the subject of an excellent article by Gail King, pdf)

On Saturday morning work began in earnest translating the Greek Core Vocabulary into Chinese, starting with the grammatical terms and categories. The Chinese scholars appreciated this exercise in particular, since the special terms to describe Greek and Latin grammar have yet to be fully standardized in Chinese. They repeatedly said that the opportunity to discuss such issues as a group was very valuable. Saturday afternoon, while work continued, Marc and I took the participants outside one by one and interviewed them on their hopes for the project, and on their views on the importance of the Greek and Roman classics in contemporary Chinese intellectual and cultural life. This video was captured by Eleanor Yan (Dickinson ’18). Her father, who works for a Chinese television station, provided the camera. We plan to edit this video into an introduction for the project on the website when it is developed.

Since the participants arrived having previously done translations of a subset of the Greek and Latin core lists, the editing work proceeded quickly once they got going. Part of Saturday afternoon and most of Sunday was devoted to the Latin list. The latter part of Sunday afternoon was spent on a discussion what direction they would like the project to go.

The most urgent immediate needs identified were:

  • Reliable lexica
  • Introductory readers based on good pedagogy, with accurate translations, and high quality audio recordings
  • Intermediate readers that included key ancient passages dealing with particular themes, such as Athenian Democracy, Roman history, and Greek philosophy
  • A glossary of unfamiliar terms from Greek and Roman culture

Greek and Latin grammars were also identified as an important project, though one that may take longer to complete. And it was agreed that the long term goal would be to produce reliable translations and commentaries on all the major of the works of the Greco-Roman classical canon, an undertaking that will take many years.

As will be apparent from the video, enthusiasm for the project was very high. The group worked together with splendid collegiality, humor, and good will, and with a sense that this is the beginning of something very important for the field. The climax of the event was the agreement on a new Chinese name for the Project and the formulation of a Chinese logo for the new “Dickinson Classics Online.”

Chinese name logo

The team that met in this seminar now constitutes our Editorial Board, the team of classicists who will oversee the development of essential infrastructure such as lexica and grammars, high quality language teaching tools for Latin and Greek, and expert commentaries and translations by Chinese scholars that make the classics fresh, relevant, and interesting to Chinese students. All resources will be provided free of charge on the internet, giving direct access to the words and ideas of the Greek and Romans to millions of people for the first time. A reasonably priced mobile application will allow serious students to learn on a convenient and portable platform.

This initial meeting included a concrete beginning, the production of a communally edited Chinese version of the DCC Greek and Latin Core Vocabularies, which is one of the most widely used features of the DCC site. We plan to have that up as a website this summer, and will work with computer science students to begin creating the mobile application.

In the meantime some prominent western scholars have signed on to be part of an Advisory Board: Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer (University of Chicago), Walter Scheidel (Stanford University), and Jeremy McInerney (University of Pennsylvania). With a distinguished team on both sides of the Pacific, we hope to be in a good position to raise substantial outside funds to make the ambitious project a reality. Our hope is that DCO can bring Chinese scholars to Dickinson to work alongside each other and with the scholarly and web development team that creates the DCC.

Left to right: Bai Chunxiao (Zhejiang University), Zhang Wei (Fudan University), Li Shangjun (Shanghai Normal University), Chen Wei (Zhejiang University), Chris Francese, Xiong Ying (Nanjing University), Jinyu Liu (DePauw University), Marc Mastrangelo, Xu Xiaoxu (Renmin University of China), Zhang Qiang (Northeast Normal University), Huang Yang (Fudan University), Liu Chun (Peking University), Wang Shaohui (Northeast Normal University)

Left to right: Bai Chunxiao (Zhejiang University), Zhang Wei (Fudan University), Li Shangjun (Shanghai Normal University), Chen Wei (Zhejiang University), Chris Francese, Xiong Ying (Nanjing University), Jinyu Liu (DePauw University), Marc Mastrangelo, Xu Xiaoxu (Renmin University of China), Zhang Qiang (Northeast Normal University), Huang Yang (Fudan University), Liu Chun (Peking University), Wang Shaohui (Northeast Normal University)