With COVID-19, digital pedagogy is more effective now than ever. An increased used of digital technologies has led teachers to implement new and creative uses of teaching in the classroom. To fight Zoom fatigue, teachers are developing ways to be more engaging and accessible to different learning abilities.

Like DH open access, education and teaching is being spread outside of classrooms. Instagram has become a sea of information for ‘controversial’ topics, meaning topics that have been perpetually excluded from academia. There is now a wealth of information about healthcare and critical race theory that is missing and intentionally left out of curriculum. To cater to engagement, TikTok has become popular among historical sites that are using this platform as a fun way to tell their history, such as Old Salem, that has a large following that is interested to learn more about the enslaved laborers at this site and the history of the transatlantic slave trade in general.

A digital society has its limitations and caters to exclusivity, however. There needs to be made recognition of the problems of accessibility in remote/digital tools used for schooling. Many marginalized communities lack access to digital technology, internet, even TikTok, let alone if they have it, they lack the tools to disseminate the information and disinformation. Risam confirms this and states, “Together, students gain an understanding of the ways that digital spaces privilege particular communities and forms of knowledge.” Not all are as Mark Prensky terms, a “digital native,” because of “inequalities in access, education, and training that reflect socioeconomic class, geography, and racialized and gendered experiences with technology.”

Perhaps this entire perspective is best summed up in this opening remark by Risam:

“Engaging with postcolonial digital pedagogy further helps students understand how print culture has played a role in constructing a world that privileges the stories, voices, and values of the Global North and how digital cultures in the twenty- first century reproduce these practices, contributing to the epistemological marginalization of the Global South.”

A digital pedagogy gives students the experience to intervene and find the gaps in history. The epistemology is shifting, and it’s happening due to students in addition to educators. Students today are more than ever engaged in the decolonization of knowledge production, and digital tools are aiding in this.

Within the ethnography of infrastructure, there are facets of analyzing how infrastructure affects our every day lives. To break it down even more, it affects us all differently, especially for those who are in ‘underdeveloped’ nations. ‘Developed’ nations get their hands on technology and rarely stop to consider where each piece of the product comes from, and who’s hands created or mined it. Posner explains the effect of software companies have on the economy and their relation to the supply chain which ultimately supports global capitalism. Many companies, aside of tech, claim they are ‘fair trade’ or free from cheap labor, but to put it simply, it is impossible to set this guarantee.

Logan Kock of Santa Monica Seafood even claims that “the supply chain is quite cloudy, especially when it comes from offshore.” He is aware that there is no way of knowing that their product hasn’t come from the hands of enslaved workers. What is fascinating is that he feels that slavery “can happen to supply chains, not just something that they themselves cause.” Therefore, he is taking the blame away from himself, and businesses that rely on thriving consumerism for commodities that support our growing capitalistic society. His and others’ naiveté is not only not acceptable, but also showing that these companies, and capitalism, is the root reason for slavery or other forms of labor abuse.

Posner emphasizes this issue: “It’s entirely possible to have an astoundingly effective supply chain while also knowing very little about it. Not only is it possible: it may be the enabling condition of capitalism at a global scale.” Posner is saying that global capitalism is therefore only possible with exploitation, slavery, and labor abuse.

Thinking about infrastructure from another angle, Greenspan discusses how Digital Humanities acts against the normative functions of a privatization of commodities by implementing open access tools and resources. In addition, he feels “digital humanists need to do more still to distinguish their own inventive and critical explorations of alternate pedagogies and methodologies from the corporate ‘innovations’”. This statement is in regards to the always evolving and feeling of incompleteness of DH projects due to the nature of open access archives, databases, etc.

Furthermore, academia ‘blames’ DH for “sapping both prestige and resources from the “pure” scholarly pursuits of merely thinking and writing.” The DH model acknowledges that it supports tenured professors and students’ research infrastructure. “The digital humanities do not pander to the system (at least not more than any other field) so much as they scandalously reveal the system’s components.”

For my text analysis project, my original thought was to analyze anthropological journals over time, focusing on language and the change in terminology in Indigenous and African American experiences in the United States. I decided against it because I would ideally like to compare the change over time, roughly every decade, and that would have been too much data to analyze for a project such as this. Instead, I began to think about what kind of corpus might be available that would be interesting to me for my interest in New York studies.

I decide to plug in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass into Voyant. A popular poet from the mid 19^th century in New York, Whitman is known for being a humanist, a transcendentalist, open about sexuality, and opposed to slavery. I was curious to see the population of word usage in Leaves of Grass, to see if there was any correlation between his known persona and his poetic voice.

With a total of 39,923 words and minor edits to the stop list to add words such as “oh,” “ere,” “shall,” and “thou” a really interesting cirrus was created.

From this visual, there is evidence of the poetic nature of the corpus with words such as “earth,” “love,” “soul,” “death,” “hand,” and “sea.” Here is a breakdown of the top 75 words by word count:

Whitman’s choice of words shows that he focuses on the ‘human body’, ‘nature’, and ‘time’ the most in his poetry. Less common themes in Leaves of Grass are ‘place’ and ‘society’ or ‘politics’. That is not to say he doesn’t discuss politics or social functions, but probably uses nature as a metaphor for discussing what was going on during his lifetime. The present theme of ‘time’ is interesting because it shows how he must have been sensitive to death and dying.

When I saw that “man,” “great,” and “earth,” were the three most common words used, I thought it would be interesting to compare his works with a female poet from New York at approximately the same time as Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass.

I came across Julia Ward Howe, a poet I’m unfamiliar with, who is also from New York and released a book of poetry titled Passion-Flowers in 1854. I chose Howe because like Whitman, she also was an abolitionist, as well as an avid social activist and women suffragist. My expectations based off the title of her book of poetry and her background would be that “women/women” would be a top count word and that there would also be a common theme of nature present.

With a total of 22,932 words and after editing the stop words “such as ‘thine,” “like,” “thought,” “let,” “know,” and “gave,” the following cirrus was created.

Unlike my expectations, Howe’s top theme seemed to be ’emotions’ and the ‘human body’. Oddly, “rome” was the 6^th most present word, appearing 42 times. To find out why, I ticked off the first 6 terms so I can see when “rome” appeared in the text on the trends graphic.

This graphic shows that Rome appears quite frequently in the first half of the book. So I went back to the book and when I looked at the contents I noticed the titles of the section referenced Rome and Italy.

I dug a little deeper and came across a summary of Passion-Flowers that explains the use of ‘Rome’:

“Passion-Flowers is a book of forty-four poems, arranged to tell the story of a poet-pilgrim’s spiritual and aesthetic quest during a time in Rome. Julia had been thinking of herself as a pilgrim for many years. While the title of the book might allude to the flower symbolic of the passion of Jesus, it is also tauntingly ambiguous. The passion-flower is never specifically mentioned in the poems, although many other flowers are named, especially roses. The word passion appears in the book in romantic and sexual contexts.

Julia would claim that the book was about the revolutionary political events of 1848, plus slavery and religion. These are not, however, the themes that stand out and shock most readers. The first-person voice of the poems is that of a woman poet or artist confessing her ambition and her unhappiness.”

(https://erenow.net/biographies/the-civil-wars-of-julia-ward-howe-a-biography/7.php)

By looking at the top 75 words by word count from Howe’s book of poetry, it is made clear that an air of feminism and religion are at the heart of her storytelling, as justified by the summary above.

While I’m not a DH student, I think I’d really like to go with the proposal option and curate it as a DH grant/award proposal. What comes to my mind is the NYCDH Graduate Student Project Award which may not be available next semester (which is my last at the GC) for my thesis capstone, but is great practice for other potential grants or awards. I’d like to continue with a project that I used for my map praxis assignment, which is the development of a future non-profit titled Northern Slavery Collective.

About the Northern Slavery Collective (NorSC)

In February 2020, staff from various museums gathered at Philipsburg Manor, New York to discuss how they are rethinking their current narratives to create inclusivity by including stories of enslaved and free peoples who lived and worked on these properties.

This network of like-minded institutions has acted as a space to work through the challenges of the interpretation of inclusive narratives. In the summer of 2021, this group created the Northern Slavery Collective, which has currently manifested as a Facebook Group and Page for the cohort to collectively share ideas, events, questions, and challenges of this interpretation process.

The organization is in its early stages, which is hoping to expand publicly through a website and social media as a resource to the public and educational communities for understanding and learning about these forgotten stories. The public facing goal is to end the myth that slavery did not exist in the North or was mild in comparison to slavery in the South.

ABOUT section from Norsc Storymaps

My DH project for NorSC

With NorSC, I’m hoping to develop a cohesive mission that supports historical sites and institutions to share the knowledge of enslaved African experiences in the Northeast. The project will be a website that functions as a source for the general public, educators/academics, and the staff/employees of these sites. Each audience will utilize the website in a different way that has DH components throughout.

The General Public

To educate the general public, the website would feature sections including general history of slavery in the Northeast, history at each site, and virtual content, including exhibitions and videos. Each site can be explored using an interactive map that will give basic features, and can be clicked to open a new page with more details. The virtual content can also incorporate Omeka to feature exhibitions and collections.

Educators/Academics

For educators and academics, there will be open access workshops, resources, syllabi, and other materials and packets that can be used for educational purposes. Again, a map feature can be used here to feature educational materials that are provide by site. I haven’t fully thought out how all the downloadable material will be stored or accessed, but this could also have some sort of DH component. In addition, presentations can be accessed from the website (not downloaded), and things like Timeline JS can also be helpful in digital education.

Staff/Employees

Staff and employees of these sites can login and access a forum to share knowledge with one another. The forum can be used as a space to collaborate on projects, share events, ask for feedback, support each others work, and so much more. The main goal would be to provide as a space to easily communicate and network with one another on exploring, discussing, and learning ways to exhibit and educate an inclusive history. I have’t fully figured out what kind of DH component would work here, but am open to any feedback, as well as feedback for this project as a whole!

Grant writing is always a tedious process. I’ve been able to learn about this process through my job at a historical house non-profit. As a small institution, we are grateful for being eligible for small-business grants, but sadly miss out on the bigger ones (typically government funders) can often be monetarily larger. Our Director of Development and Community Engagement is our grant writer and since I work closely with her, I’m able to gain some experience in assisting with the grant writing process. We recently received our first government grant and are also currently writing a proposal for NEH. Oddly, this NEH grant is very specifically NOT Digital Humanities. As we are slowly coming out of the pandemic, NEH is looking to fund institutions for in-person humanities projects.

From this experience and with the reading for this week there are a few things I’ve learned about NEH grants.

1. NEH grants are very time consuming! They contain a lot of components, with multiple sections that can be at least 10 pages (single space) long each. Not only that, NEH looks for academic writing, where most other grant-giving institutions prefer a conversational tone.
2. They are thorough! Having multiple components will make you (the person or institution writing the grant) stronger. These can include project format, resources, history, project leaders, and of course, a detailed budget.
3. They are a great skill to learn! Grant writing is very useful and can be beneficial in many job positions, whether you will be writing grants or not. For our class, it’s great for grad students to get funding for their academic projects.

Grant Tracking Resources

Grant writing requires a lot of time and organization. There are many applications out there to stay organized, such as Grant Hub or Airtable. You can also create a spreadsheet to help stay on task.

Maintain Significance

The posts we read about for today’s class were very informative. Even though at my work we are not currently working on a DH grant, there is still a lot I’ve learned that I can share with my team to help stay on track. One of the things that sticks out the most from the readings was keeping in mind the significance of your project and the criteria for each section.

It is helpful to continue to reference these steps to make sure you don’t lose sight of the project’s needs and significance and what makes you stand out from the rest of the applicants.

Link to map: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/ffade26171e64634a0e6e44c21517c26

After testing various mapping platforms, including spending copious amount of time trying to teach myself Tableau, I decided to go with ArcGIS and ArcGIS Storymaps to showcase historic sites in the northeast that are implementing inclusive narratives to include the lives of free and enslaved people who lived and worked at these sites. I currently work for an historic site that is beginning to implement enslaved narratives through the use of art installations and community conversations. The following information is provided on my Storymap to situate the reader to what this Storymap entails:

In February 2020, staff from various museums gathered at Philipsburg Manor, New York to discuss how they are rethinking their current narratives to create inclusivity by including stories of enslaved and free peoples who lived and worked on these properties.

This network of like-minded institutions has acted as a space to work through the challenges of the interpretation of inclusive narratives. In the summer of 2021, this group created the Northern Slavery Collective, which has currently manifested as a Facebook Group and Page for the cohort to collectively share ideas, events, questions, and challenges of this interpretation process.

The organization is in its early stages, which is hopeful to expand publicly through a website and social media as a resource to the public and educational communities for understanding and learning about these forgotten stories. The public facing goal is to end the myth that slavery did not exist in the North or was mild in comparison to slavery in the South.

My Process

As I stated, I first spent hours converting census information into an excel to be inputed into a Tableau map to see the variation of enslaved population sizes between the North and the South. I felt this data to be a little flat, and couldn’t find what story I was trying to tell. The data was hard to manipulate, and the population sizes weren’t giving me what I wanted. It showed the vast difference in slave populations between the North and South while I wanted to show just how much slavery was actually involved in the North. While the numbers were smaller, enforced enslaved laborers in the North provided greatly to the development of Northern societies, including infrastructure and commodities. These are the stories I wanted to tell. Thinking back on the Northern Slavery Collective, I thought those historic sites would be a great way to share these stories.

Storymaps

I’ve used Storymaps in the past, so I knew what I was capable of doing and not doing. The interactive maps provide a user friendly visual, but the lack of multiple media pieces for each map entry is a let down. Also, the UI is a bit finicky when trying to sort the order of the sites on my map. I included the description listed above as an overview of the Storymaps, followed by a map of the various historic sites in the Northeast overlaid with the 1790 census population that I created in ArcGIS. (The ability to create maps in ArcGIS which can then be added to Storymaps was a huge bonus!) Below this visual is another map showing the locations of the historic sites with an image of the site that is interactive.

I have been debating whether or not I want to include more details on this map section because I currently like the clean look. When I add text, it appears below the historic site titles where I wish it would only be visible when the historic site is clicked. When this happens, a new view pops up that can include more description, such as address and website.

Since I wanted to include the stories of these sites and include more images, I created another section for this purpose. Here I list the various sites and included descriptions that were provided mostly by the Historic Hudson Valley’s People Not Property project at Philipsburg Manor. This section is still being worked on as there are numerous sites to cover.

ArcGIS map

As I stated before, I implemented a layered map of census data and historic site locations. ArcGIS made it very simple in that a user had already created a beautiful census map that I could use. When hovering the mouse over a region you can see the full details of the various census fields, including enslaved persons. By adding pinpoints of the historic houses, you can visually see houses in areas that are listed as having 0 enslaved people in those regions. This stark visual helps debunk the myth that slavery was not present in the north.

Overall, I think ArcGIS Storymaps was very user friendly for a non-Digital Humanities student and is very visually pleasing. I’m glad I attempted to try a different software, so in the future if I need to create a map with data and I have a longer time period, I would consider using Tableau after taking an informational workshops or watching many tutorials.

One of the most prominent aspects of Digital Humanities is its connectedness and fluidity in multiple social science and humanities-based disciplines. The fusion of digital tools and humanities research optimizes the approach and availability of graduate and scholarly-level projects for the public. It expands the accessibility of knowledge by being available as an open resource in a digital space. Many digital humanities projects invite collaboration which further the conversations that often related to projects connected to activism, awareness, decolonization, and so on.

One such example of a digital humanities project is the Colored Conventions Project (CCP). This project is based on the history of colored conventions that occurred throughout the early to mid 1800s as political organizations that strategized for racial justice. The project acts as not only an archive of digital records but provides exhibits and teaching materials to learn about this history, as well as collaborative projects with artists and other educational institutions to further their outreach of educating the masses of the underrepresented history.

Based on the readings, digital humanists often have conflicting theories and understandings of what it means to be a digital humanist. In “The Digital Humanities Moment by Matthew K Gold, Gold quotes Stephan Ramsay who posits that digital humanists must know how to code and that “if you are not making anything, you are not… a digital humanist.” Gold argues that other digital humanists disagree in that one doesn’t need to build the tools but utilize the tools to share humanities research on a digital plane. CCP is an example of a digital humanities sites that takes advantage of those tools, such as Omeka, Piktochart and Google Maps.

The CCP offers a site for educators by providing resources for professors and exhibits they can share with their class that are created using the previously stated digital tools. What is unique about this project is how they not only tell this history, but also strongly use the movement’s social justice beliefs within their team and formation of the CCP. Not only are they expanding the American history dialogue of underrepresented populations, but being a source of predominantly Black woman who have for so long not had the access to a proliferate organization focused on advocacy for Black lives.

Again, digital humanists can argue over whether the CCP is a digital humanities project on the notion that the aim of this is heavily geared towards educators. Some digital humanists as Gold pointed out, expect accessibility to be public facing. Due to the specificity of the topic of CCP, this site would not be stumbled upon by the average public-facing person, but is specifically designed to be provided to educational professors and academics. It also comes across as a history or virtual museum, which some digital humanists might point out that it is too focused or not welcoming of utilizing various fields. This come from the Big Tent theory, where DH should have non-central relations, whereas I feel CCP starts with a central field and has been influenced by digital tools that portray digital humanities. What this does offer to the evolution of digital humanities is the fight against the diversity issues that were once “ills” amongst DH, by supporting Black voices by Black voices.