Moravian Studies and Digital Thinking and Praxis

August 30, 2015August 30, 2015

A Head Full of Landscapes

11953433_10156007256405531_7819659433424511952_o — View across Lake Clarke on the Lower Susquehanna

Yesterday I fulfilled a desire, harbored for all the years I have been working on the Susquehanna River; and that was to travel as far south as I could to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. It took a lot of driving and navigating, but I did it.

This desire was not merely a romantic wish to experience the river from source to bay (which now I have done, albeit not always in a kayak). I was stunned at the changes the river goes through, from its modest beginnings up in Cooperstown; its torments at the hands of the post-industrial towns of Binghamton and Wilkes Barre; its majesty on the North Branch as it winds its way through the mountains, steep wooded ridges rising on both sides and monitored by high soaring eagles; the calmer waters as it joins with the West Branch at Sunbury and provides the motorist on route 15 with a most glorious companion with its wide stretches, and myriad wooded, farmed, and rocky islands, that reminded one Moravian missionary of a city with its avenues and cross streets. And then finally, the transformation of a river into a series of lakes, some over 200 feet deep, formed behind the hydro-electric dams of Safe Harbor, Holtwood and Conowingo.

11891419_10156008699365531_2207592145489207193_o — Standing at Fisherman’s Park on the spillway below the Conowingo Dam.

It is late summer and the river is low. From the main branch down to Wrightsville, the bed rock is visible, jutting up over the surface to make riffles that would please any kayaker and exposing the ledges in the river bed. The water is warm, maybe too warm for the fish to enjoy and thus the eagles hunt elsewhere. But below the last dam, at the spillway of the Conowingo, this wide full river is a trickle, meandering like an afterthought through the rocks. Its banks bustling with anglers and birders, this final stage of the river seems on an August afternoon weary of its 444 mile journey to the sea, almost succumbing to defeat at the hands of human industry. As I looked downriver all that was visible were the final metal bridges crisscrossing the viewscape before you get to the Bay. An ignominious end.

I had a very pragmatic need to make this journey yesterday. I am in the final stages of compiling a report for the National Park Service on the Indigenous Cultural Landscape of the Lower Susquehanna. As part of the segment planning process, I am heading up a team of scholars and mappers to make an argument to the NPS for certain landscapes of the Susquehanna to be designated as “evocative of the natural and cultural resources supporting American Indian lifeways and settlement patterns in the early 17th century.” (See http://www.nps.gov/chba/learn/news/indigenous-cultural-landscapes.htm) These landscapes are also important to descendant communities today, and are intended to aid conservation strategies in the Chesapeake and its watershed. This has not been an easy process. As this approach to understanding large landscapes is still in the development stage, it has not always been clear how to describe an “Indigenous Cultural Landscape” without succumbing to the romanticization of an indigenous viewpoint, without projecting the settler culture’s desire for a “edenic” past (to quote my colleague and collaborator, Alf Siewers). And indeed, the displacement and genocide of the Native populations of Pennsylvania means that those descendant people are probably radically dislocated from these landscapes. Unlike Virginia or Maryland or New Jersey, Pennsylvania is one of only two states left in the Union that does not recognize the presence of Native nations in its borders. Thus, the very notion of a Native heritage landscape is thoroughly disrupted. And unlike the PI’s in other Indigenous Cultural Landscape studies (as on the Nanticoke river) I can’t go to the recognized American Indian nations and ask, “What does this place mean to you?” because they are elsewhere.

The vast amount of work that has been completed by my colleagues and our students on the history and culture of the Susquehanna River under the umbrella of the “Stories of the Susquehanna” is crucial to the rebuilding of Native American connections to the landscapes that were left behind. Through outreach to the Haudenosaunee, facilitated by Sid Jamieson, and public history events, such as the North Branch Heritage Kayak sojourns, organized by David Buck of Endless Mountains Outfitters, bonds are being rebuilt between the landscapes of the Susquehanna and the descendants of those people who populated them, hundreds of years ago. And there are those, like Onondago Canoe Club owner, Hickory Edwards, whose mission it is to “reindigenize” the river. Paddling the length of the Susquehanna last year, down to Annapolis and then walking on to Washington DC to the opening of “Nation to Nation” exhibition of treaties at the Museum of the American Indian, Hickory might exemplify a Native view of Indigenous Cultural Landscapes. They are being rediscovered, like a newly revitalized part of the body, awakened after centuries of numbness.

The guidelines for creating an ICL make it clear that the importance of landscapes to descendant communities today is central. But my question is, who is the audience or viewer of the landscape? Yesterday, as I paused for a meeting at the Zimmerman Heritage Center on Long Level, I was thrilled to see the progress that had been made there in creating interpretive materials for the passing public. A stylish jetty on the waterfront has been built, shaded by a sloping roof and lined with benches wide enough to provide work space for me and my computer and my collaborators. In front of us, a full size replica of Benjamin Latrobe’s glorious survey of the Lower Susquehanna, commissioned by the Pennsylvania State legislature for the “improvement” of the river from Columbia down to the head of the Bay, is displayed, revealing a water viewscape radically different from that which confronts today’s visitors who can read, “Latrobe’s Susquehanna survey represents a rare profile of the physical features of a region just beginning to feel the impact of agricultural and commercial development.” As true as this is, the view across the river, now a lake, also points us in the direction of Washington Boro, the site of dense Native American settlement and horticulture/agriculture during the timeframe delineated by the requirements of the Indigenous Cultural Landscape initiative. Benjamin Latrobe’s survey certainly gives the viewer an idea of the radical change in the river thanks to the hydroelectric dams of 20th century energy production, but what it does not tell us is that this was a center of trade, exchange, agriculture and human interaction with the environment for hundreds of years prior to his “clearing” or dynamiting of a channel up the river. This part of the story is told behind the viewer. Turn around and climb the escarpment and you will find the “Native Lands County Park”, which at my last visit to this place was just an idea. Now the visitor can learn about the last known village of the Susquehannock Indians that stood on top of this hill (1676-1680) (the Byrd Leibhart site) where once 3,000 people lived in a stockaded four acre village in 16 ninety foot longhouses. The view from this hilltop reveals the wide sky, water and rolling hills of the Piedmont, now punctuated with wind turbines and McMansions. But the sense of this landscape is strong enough to blot out those intrusions of 21st century America (for now).

Even with the deep knowledge I have of this landscape, its history of human settlement and conflict, its soils, its elevation, its climate, its cultivation, I cannot see it through Native eyes. And I should not. If all that this initiative does is to deepen the settler culture’s understanding of the place on which it stands and builds and dynamites and dams, then I think much will have been achieved. However, within the borders of Pennsylvania’s bastion of historical denial, within this state of willed and legislated amnesia, we are a very long way from reindigenizing our landscapes.

July 2, 2015July 2, 2015

Pedagogical Hermeneutics and Teaching DH in a Liberal Arts Context

Diane Jakacki and I gave the following presentation yesterday at DH2015 in Sydney, Australia. We include the slides and the abbreviated form of the talk. The complete version will be published as an article in the near future.

Thanks to everyone for coming and for your interest!

We take our title from Alan Liu’s challenge to DH educators to develop a distinctive pedagogical hermeneutic of “practice, discovery, and community” What does this look like? How do we put this into practice?

This paper focuses on our teaching experience at Bucknell University in the academic year 2014-15 to show how the planning, design, and execution of a new project-based course, Humanities 100, introduced undergraduate students to the world of digital humanities through the use of selected digital tools and methods of analysis. This course, taught within the Comparative Humanities program, was designed specifically for first- and second-year students with no background in digital humanities, in order to encourage the development of digital habits of mind at the earliest phases of their liberal arts curricular experience. Developed to encourage examination and experimentation with a range of digital humanities approaches, the course asks students to work with primary archival materials as core texts to encourage digital modes of inquiry and analysis. The decision to root the course in a multi-faceted analysis of archival materials provided the rare chance for students to also engage in the research process typical for a humanities scholar: namely, the discovery of artifacts, the formulation of research questions, followed by the analysis and synthesis of findings culminating in the publication of initial findings in a digital medium. In the process, we introduced students to the basic structure of how to develop a DH research project.

The Comparative Humanities program is an ideal curricular environment to teach such classes with its explicit learning goals of comparativity (historical period, cultures, genres, modality) to which we added course specific learning goals that pertain to DH. (Slide with goals) The course therefore provided us with the opportunity to not only expose students to methodologies related to distant and close reading, network and spatial visualization, but also requiring that they learn to think critically about what each of these methods, and the tools that they used within the course, reveals in the texts with which they worked.

To date the course has been taught three times: as twin sections in Fall 2014 in which we both used the same scaffolding method with discrete subject matter and core texts. We participated fully in one another’s sections – this gave us the opportunity to teach our specializations within each other’s classes. Katie Faull taught the course again in Spring 2015, and Diane Jakacki participated. Both of us will teach a section next year.

This approach to teaching is important as we consider how to incorporate DH into the classroom. It required significant commitment on both our parts to the actual execution of the course, as well as recognition that we needed to be transparent to ourselves as well as to our students about how this represented a new model for course design at Bucknell. It is important to note that while other DH-inflected courses are being taught, this is the first Digital Humanities course at Bucknell.

At Bucknell, the focus in digital humanities scholarship and learning to date has been primarily on spatial thinking, until recently rooted in working with ArcMap-type GIS and thinking about humanities in “place”. It was important to both of us to emphasize and extend that objective in the development of the course and its learning outcomes, and so we focused on finding materials that would be of interest to students so that they could relate to the historical context more directly.

The first time the course was taught we decided to run it in two sections, anticipating an opportunity to reflect different perspectives of our expertise with DH methods and tools. Diane’s focus has until now been on text encoding and analysis, while Katie’s has been on mapping and data visualization. We also worked with discrete data sets of archival materials. Katie’s course focused on the Colonial mission diaries of the Moravians from Shamokin, Pennsylvania (today Sunbury) and situated 9 miles downstream from the university. Written in English, the diary sections selected dealt with interactions between some of the first Europeans to the area and the Native peoples they met and worked among. Katie has spent the past five years working with this subject matter, and is considered an expert in the field of Moravian studies.

Diane’s course considered a subset of the diaries of James Merrill Linn, one of the first graduates of the university and a soldier in the American Civil War. The choice of the Linn material had to do solely with its accessibility – Linn’s family left his life papers to the Bucknell Archives. Diane’s research is not in 19th century American history, and so she had to be honest that engaging with Linn’s diaries would be a discovery for her, too. In Katie’s iteration of the course this Spring, she selected materials that took the students slightly further afield, but still kept them within the Susquehanna watershed and the Chesapeake Bay using a different set of Moravian archival materials. (Slide with archival materials)

Both of our choices reflect and extend Bucknell’s interest in digital/spatial thinking in terms of its place in the larger historical and cultural narrative. In all cases, students responded well to the investigation of places familiar to them, with several students having family connections to specific locales mentioned in the archival materials. The pedagogical hermeneutics of Humanities 100 were intentionally designed to encourage student examination and experimentation and discovery with a range of digital humanities approaches. To this end, the sequencing of the modules was carefully designed so that the “product” of each module then became the “data” of the next module.

In addition to praxis-oriented assignments, we wanted students to understand the broader context of their work within a DH framework. To that end we assigned theoretical readings and analysis of a range of major DH projects, which students then wove into their online reflections. Extensive use was made of online platforms that emphasize important forms of digital engagement, including collaborative online writing environments. Each module ended with a short assignment and also a reflective public-facing blog post that became a shared form of intellectual engagement.

In order to begin any kind of DH archival project the students had to produce a digital text. In the first iteration of the course we did not have a transcription desk available and so students transcribed the assigned pages of the original into a shared Google doc. This digital text was then color-coded in terms of “proto” tags to ease the way into close reading with TEI tags in Oxygen. By the time the second semester started we had obtained an institutional subscription to the online platform Juxta Editions which we were then able to use as the transcription platform and also the introduction to thinking about tagging. From the transcription came the lightly marked up digital text that was then imported into Oxygen for more complex tagging. Students then began tagging in earnest and were introduced to the discoveries of close reading involved in marking up a text. Names, places, and dates were easy (in Juxta edition they had already been imported). However the hermeneutical fun started with working out whether a boat was a place or an object, for example. Or whether God was a person. And just what is balsam, an object? an emotion?

During these classes, the historical remoteness of the texts (in Faull’s class from the first half of the 18th century, focusing on Native Americans in the fall and in the Spring on preaching to the enslaved peoples on the Tobacco Coast) was lessened by the act of tagging and the lively discussions that surrounded it. Once a reliable text had been established we then introduced students to the concept of “distant reading” through the Voyant platform. At the same time as students were encouraged to “play” we also pointed out the circular motion of discovery and confirmation that is inherent in any research experience. The students had just read these archival texts very carefully in order to transcribe them, so we asked them the usual kinds of questions one asks when approaching any kind of new text. What is it about? What are the major themes? Who are the most important characters? Then, having read Edward Whitley’s text on distant reading we asked the students to think about what reading a text distantly does to that hermeneutic. (Slide of distant reading prompt and visualizations)

This data, the TEI tags, crucial to the success of the students’ mark up assignment and the production of a final digital document, needed some restructuring as we moved onto the next module. To manage this, we developed a prosopography for each core text – a database of people, places, and connections that grew organically out of the focus of each specific section and provided the data for entry into Gephi and was then built out in adding geospatial data for GIS. So for example, one group of students wanted to use Gephi to interrogate the assumption that relationships between the missionaries and the Native Americans in the area around the mission remained constant. However, by using the TEI persName tags and exporting them into a Gephi node/edge tables the students were able to show how relations between the Native leaders and the Moravian missionaries changed over a five year period of the mission (Include slide of Jerry and Henna’s work). Students also used the sigma.js plug in so that the network visualizations were interactive. However successful this team was in their work, it was clear from all iterations of the class that the hermeneutics of social networks was the hardest for the students to analyse and manipulate (which is quite ironic, given how most of them are well plugged in to Twitter, Instagram, etc).

Lastly, students worked in ArcGIS Online to consider the evidence they had discovered within these texts in terms of spatial analysis. The story maps they produced became a new form of critical essay, with thesis, arguments supported by direct evidence, and conclusion all presented within a story map framework. so, for example, one student used Linn’s references to ships running aground during a storm at Hatteras Inlet, found a contemporary document reporting on the damage done to Union ships during this point in the campaign, and overlaid his evidence on a nautical map drawn in 1861 to determine where Linn’s ship had foundered.

Both the composition of the class (in terms of student personalities) and also the nature of the material determined to some extent the kind of final project students chose. For example, in my section there were some natural groupings of students and there were a variety of final projects (one involving Gephi; two TEI markup; one hybrid ArcMap and TEI; and one story map). In Diane’s class all but two students chose to work independently In the second iteration of Katie’s course, students decided that they would produce one final group project all together –a course website that highlighted the best of their DH work. (Slide of Payne Froehlich website)

Assessment slide–self-explanatory

Another challenge to the class design was the high number of L2 students who enrolled in it. In Katie’s Fall 2014 section there were 2 students of 9 from mainland China; in her spring section that ratio increased to three of five. In the fall there was one from Australia and one from Vietnam (neither L2s but international students); one student in the spring course was from South Africa – her first language was Afrikaans. Although the students admitted to being challenged by the readings and also the public facing writing in the blog site, a means for adjusting for student errors and allowing for corrections was developed that would allow the students to post their blog reflections in a way that did not impede their openness to reflection, knowing that they would have an opportunity to correct their English.

However, for all the challenges involved in teaching the class, there were moments of glory. Disengaged students became engaged; solitary learners recognized the essential need to collaborate in order to succeed; participants recognized the transformative nature of the course to their own concepts of the humanities. Students were eager to participate in crowdsourced data collection; they were intrigued to visualize ego-networks as they learned the concepts of network theory; they were excited to see their marked up transcriptions published in an online digital edition. Through these discoveries, they realized that they were creating a community of young DHers and expressed eagerness to take part in more of these learning experiences. Thank you!

May 14, 2015June 10, 2016

“Writing a Moravian Memoir: the Intersection of History and Autobiography”

Monday, May 11, 2015, University of Goteborg, Sweden

I delivered this seminar paper via Skype to a group of European scholars interested in ways of reading and analyzing Moravian memoirs. The two day seminar was entitled “Life-writing and Lebenslauf: Pillars of an invisible church” and was organized by Dr. Christer Ahlberger, in the faculty of History. In this paper I discuss ways of thinking about autobiography and the Moravian memoir, both as a radical act within the history of the genre and also, when analyzing the memoirs with the methods of DH, as a radical hermeneutic to reveal new voices in the historical record.

The genre of autobiography is a tricky one. Although only recently even acknowledged within the scholarly community as an object worthy of critical scrunity, autobiography has for millenia served the purpose of providing a model of the exemplary life. Whether in the form of saints’ lives, the chronicles of kings and queens, the political autobiography, or Johannes Arndt’s “best seller” the Historie der Wiedergeborenen, all have served the purpose of shaping others’ lives. Through autobiography the author is able to examine memory, shape experience, interrogate the reasons for action and examine conscience. For the reader, the genre provides an opportunity to view this process within another human subject, to witness the relation of authentic (or inauthentic) experience and emotion. Continue reading ““Writing a Moravian Memoir: the Intersection of History and Autobiography””

May 13, 2015May 13, 2015

Student Final Project for HUMN 100-The Humanities Now! Spring 2015

This spring I taught another iteration of HUMN 100 to a small group of highly motivated and talented students. Like last semester, (see HUMN 100) this is a project-based class where students take an as yet unpublished manuscript from the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA and develop their DH skills.

Screenshot 2015-05-05 21.26.02 — Click image for link to website

This semester we were fortunate enough to work on the Travel Journal of Christian Froehlich and Jasper Payne. Students started with the transcription of the manuscript and once a text had been established they were then able to analyze it using the lenses of the digital humanities. The course website can be found here, where the outline, assignments, and blog posts are organized by topic (Close Reading, Distant Reading, Visualization, and Time).

January 30, 2015May 14, 2015

Teaching with Emerging Technology: the Centrality of the Collaborative Mode

Over the last 6 months I have been working with the latest instructional technologies and digital tools in my class, Humanities 100. This course, brand new for the 2014-15 academic year is designed to teach students how to create a digital project with archival materials. The goal of the course is to teach students the importance of the creation of a digital text; to think about the design of data that stems from that digital text; to make intelligent decisions about the presentation of that digital text on the web; to teach students how to mark up a text in TEI lite and beyond; to begin to think about how to add geo-spatial elements to the analysis; and also how that text can be mined to build up a database of people and places (at the least) that can then be used to create a network analysis of the text. That is a lot to learn; and from my experience last semester I can say that some students wanted to stop at, say, transcription of the text, or mark-up. Continue reading “Teaching with Emerging Technology: the Centrality of the Collaborative Mode”

November 27, 2014November 27, 2014

A Shamokin Thanksgiving

As we gather today in the Susquehanna Valley to share our food with friends and family, we might be curious how this time of year was celebrated back in 1747, in the time of Chief Shikellamy and the beginnings of the Moravian mission at what was then called Shamokin, today Sunbury.

1747 had been a very busy and important year in the history of Shamokin. The project of establishing a forge at the Confluence of the North and West Branches of the Susquehanna River, first requested by the Six Nations in 1745 and not approved by the Colonial government in Philadelphia until 1747, had finally been achieved. Moravians and Indians had met in conference in the spring of that year to discuss exactly how the forge would be built and the conditions under which the Six Nations and their emissary, Shikellamy, would permit the European missionaries to live at the confluence. Shikellamy and his sons had helped to construct the mission house and smithy during the summer months and the Moravians had already cleared land around their house to plant corn, beans, and squash. By the end of July the smithy was ready for business, with the preferred customers being the Indians of the Six Nations (for whom account books were kept); and traders being just tolerated. The wives of the Moravian missionaries, Anna Mack and Catharine Schmidt were already participating fully in the economy of the smithy and mission as they took in sewing from the Indians, mending Shikellamy’s shirts on a regular basis.

But the hard work of setting up the smithy and mission house had already taken its toll on one of the Moravians. After a long trip down river to collect supplies, Brother Hagen succumbed to the prevailing fever and, in September of 1747, was buried in a plot just beyond the turnip field, accompanied by a beautiful service of song.

That November was cold. The charcoal fire in the forge had been started, and many Indians passing through Shamokin stopped at the smithy to have work done to their weapons and to keep warm. The last full week of November was marked by the sadness that prevailed at the death of Shikellamy’s two year old grandchild. Anna Mack and Catharina Schmidt sewed, as requested, a death shroud for her out of a piece of linen brought to them by the Indian women, and then visited the dead child before burial.

But amid the sadness there was kindness and hope. The sharing of dried cherries and bread between a Mohican woman (Shikellamy’s daughter in law, the wife of his eldest son) and the Moravians; the sharing of Moravian bread with a cold tired and hungry Delaware man from the Wyoming Valley. The last Thursday in November 1747 brought a woman trader to the mission with much rum, much to the dismay of the Moravians. They neither wanted alcohol in Shamokin nor traders, whether male or female. The Moravian Sisters spent “Black Friday” chopping and fetching wood, while their husbands were working in the smithy or repairing shoes.

That Saturday, the rum the woman trader had brought to town had clearly been exchanged for skins and the population of Shamokin was drunk. Order returned with Shikellamy though, who had been absent on Colonial business and arrived that evening from Tulpehocken and Conrad Weiser’s house with letters and news for the Moravians. He had also brought a piece of beef for Catharine Smith and the others from her mother who lived close by Conrad Weiser’s.

The relations between Shikellamy, his family and the Moravians were clearly warm and loving. His daughter in law, the Mohican, was worried about the fate of the dead child, for example. Would the child be with God even though it wasn’t baptized? Yes, said Anna Mack, she will be, because we are all loved by God, regardless of whether we are baptized or not. And as a sign of fellowship the Moravians bring Shikellamy his favorite, turnips.

Looking back at these records from nearly 270 years ago the picture we can see of relations between the Native peoples and the Moravian missionaries is clearly not the one that is popularly depicted with turkeys and pies and pumpkins. However, what we can see is a time of mutual aid, kindness, and significant intercultural understanding. True, the Moravians are not like all “white people”, a comment often made by the Indians who witness their quiet love. The outside forces of the traders and Colonial policies have their effect on the population around Shamokin, in that rum is all that Indians can trade their goods for. But the last Thursday of November in 1747 is marked by shared food and warmth. A true Thanksgiving.

November 4, 2014November 4, 2014

The Importance of Understanding Visual Rhetoric: thoughts on Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis

I am re-posting on my personal site my blog entry for my class site for The Humanities Now! These are questions that I have been thinking about a lot, and my reading of Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis has really helped to crystallize my ideas. I am so happy that she will be coming to Bucknell in April of 2015 as part of our Humanities Institute on the Digital Humanities.

Over the last week or so, we have revisited visualization as a technique for interpretation. In our production of networks using Gephi, the process of creating data, preparing it for input into the software, manipulating it once in the software and then interpreting it once entered has been foremost. As we move on to mapping, we will find parallel processes at work: preparing data, entering it, manipulating it, interpreting it. And as we do so, it behooves us to think critically about what we are doing, and what we are not doing.

Johanna Drucker’s intelligent, broad view of visualization as a form of knowledge production offers us many pointers for taking each step on our path to visualization and interpretation with deliberation. The long chapter “Interpreting Visualization–Visualization Interpretation” from her book, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard, 2014) presents us with an overview of forms of visualization primarily since the Renaissance, and it also issues a plea for the development of a greater understanding of the force of visual rhetoric; a plea that is directed especially at humanists, as they enter into a realm of spatialized representation that might appear to belong to the realm of the quantitative over the qualitative.

Visualizations can be either representations or knowledge generators in which the spatialization or arrangement of elements is meaningful. When reading a visualization, Drucker encourages us to use language carefully, employing terms such as “juxtapose”, “hierarchy”, “proximity”. Drucker claims that visualization exploded onto the intellectual scene at the edge of the late Renaissance and beginning of the early Enlightenment, when engraving technologies were able to produce epistemologically stunning diagrams that both described and also produced knowledge. Now with the advent of digital means to manipulate and produce data we can all produce timelines (!) without giving a thought to the revolution in the conceptualization of time and history that (our near neighbor) Joseph Priestley occasioned. So, as we play with Timemapper or Timeglider, Drucker cautions us to become aware of the visual force of such digital generations. “The challenge is to break the literalism of representational strategies and engage with innovations in interpretive and inferential modes that augment human cognition.” (p. 71)

How do we do this? Drucker argues for us to recognize three basic principles of visualization, both as producers and as interpreters: a) the rationalization of a surface; b) the distinction of figure and ground; c) the delimitation of the domain of visual elements so that they function as a relational system.

In her sections on the most prevalent forms of visualization, I find most pertinent to the coming module on mapping her insight that a graphical scheme through which we relate to the phenomenal world structures our experience of it (p. 74). In other words, the mapping of the earth, sky, sea or the measurement of time, that are in themselves complex reifications of schematic knowledge, actually become the way in which we experience that thing. The week is seven days long and the month is 28-31 days long (because of lunar cycles) and thus astronomical tables become the way we structure time. But time isn’t like that; it isn’t linear, especially in the humanities! It contains flashbacks, memories, foreshadowings, relativities (it speeds up when we are nervous, and slows down when we are scared). So we are imposing structures from social and natural sciences onto human experience. Drucker argues that the shape of temporality is a reflection of beliefs and not standard metrics, and therefore asks how do we find a graphical means to inscribe the subjective experience of temporality or the spatial?

For example, digital mapping may give us the ability to georectify a manuscript map onto a coordinate system, but what does this give us? It might show us how accurate a mapmaker was, or was not; it might help us to locate an archaeological site with more probability, but it is ignoring the fact that the manuscript map, drawn perhaps on buckskin, or stone, or vellum is a representation (and a thin one at that) of a traveler’s or observer’s experience that we are then translating into a system of coordinates. What is absent is the story; way-finding depends upon narratives, travel accounts, diaries. We must be aware that maps produce the illusion of isomorphism, but this illusion is based on an elaborate system of abstract schema and concrete reality.

I am most captivated by the section of her chapter that focuses on visualizing uncertainty and interpretive cartography, as this is an area I have thought a lot about in the last five years during which I have been working with GIS. As a software, GIS gives us enormous power to produce knowledge as a generator; through the combinatory power of layers, and base maps, and points, and embedded data tables, GIS has often seduced me with its “deceptive naturalism of maps and bar charts” generated from spreadsheets that I and my students have spent months creating. It strengthens the fiction of observer-independence; the objectivity of the “bird’s eye view”, and, as Drucker so aptly states, “we rush to suspend critical judgment in visualization.” For me, however, and for the students I have worked with, the question of how to represent ambiguity has consumed us; as has also how to make ambiguity the ground of representation. I think here of the brilliant visualizations of Steffany Meredyk, ’14 as she created her interpretive map of the main stem of the Susquehanna River.

Steffany Meredyk's map of the Susquehanna River — Steffany Meredyk’s map of the Susquehanna River

Using the work of Margaret Pearce, Steffany and I talked for long hours about the importance of reinserting the positionality of the observer into the visualizations of the river. Taking her “data” from accounts of massacres in the 1760-80s that occurred on the Susquehanna River, and using graphical means of Adobe Illustrator to represent ambiguity, uncertainty and emotion, I consider Steffany’s work to act as a model for the way in which we can use digital media and methods as humanists. We can, as Drucker observes, “model phenomenological experience; model discourse fields; model narratives and model interpretation.”

September 26, 2014

Re-indigenizing the River: Hickory Edward’s Epic Quest down the Susquehanna River

Katherine Faull, Bucknell University

10450768_702574029833428_8851394656366455209_n — View of the North Branch of the Susquehanna River

Kayaking is not just a sport to Hickory Edwards of the Onondaga Nation. It is his way of reviving his nation’s knowledge about its own history and the environment, and also raising public awareness about the ties of the Haudenosaunee to the land. This summer, the coordinator of the Onondaga Kayak and Canoe club decided to retrace the steps and paddle strokes of his forebears by kayaking first from Buffalo, New York along the Tioughioga to the Chenango river to Onondaga on a trip that became known as “The Journey to the Central Fire” to recognize Onondaga’s central position in the “Long House” of the Six Nations. While attending the annual four-day reading of the Haudenosaunee’s “Great Law of Peace” Edwards listened to the words that had been recited so many times about the planting of the Tree of Peace that had brought unity and concord to the then five warring nations of the Iroquois. Seeing that tree in his mind’s eye, Edwards realized that its spreading white roots were actually routes of peace, traditional waterways that spread out from the center of the Haudenosaunee world, waterways that would take him to the sea in whatever direction of the compass he chose to go.

He decided to go south, down the Susquehanna River to the Chesapeake Bay and from there on to Washington DC. “We wanted to take our message from the capitol of the Haudenosaunee to the capitol of the US,” he said in a recent interview from his home near Syracuse, NY. And what is that message? “We are still here. The Native people and their trade routes and waterways are not forgotten. We need to remember our language and our lands. We need to re-indigenize the river.” The goal of this epic human-powered journey was the National Museum of the American Indian on the capitol’s Mall where an exhibition opened on September 21, 2014, “Nation to Nation,” that celebrates the historic treaties drawn up between the Native nations and the colonial governments. “The treaties are still valid,” said Edwards “so we decided to go see them.”

capitol and hickory — Edwards carrying the Haudenosaunee flag to the National Museum of the American Indian

Although prepared to paddle over 500 miles alone, Hickory Edwards could not help but attract support from wherever he went. Joined five days into the journey by fellow kayaker, Noah Onheda and supported the whole way down by his parents acting as ground crew, Edwards described the highlights of the trip down the Susquehanna. For example, standing at Indian Rocks just north of Wyalusing, where Handsome Lake, religious leader of the Six Nations in the late 1700s contemplated the spiritual future of his people. Or the petroglyphs at Safe Harbor that represent powerful, ancient things, carved into what looks like a little Turtle Island in the river. “This is what we must do,” said Edwards “relearn the waterways of our peoples to know where these places are.” Following what he called the “white route of peace” south, Edwards claimed they never had one bad night. “The water was good to us all the way down.” Well, except the very last day, when the winds on the Chesapeake Bay picked up and the waves rose so high around the kayaks that Edwards lost sight of his paddling companion Noah for the height of the water. “Maybe the waves didn’t want us on the water that last day,” Edwards mused. Despite the wind and tide and waves, they made it to Sandy Point State Park, just outside Annapolis, Maryland where they were greeted by representatives of the National Park Service, Deanna Beacham and Suzanne Copping, and treated to a meal, big enough to sate any epic paddler’s appetite!

Having not really used their legs for nearly three weeks, walking over 30 miles from Annapolis to Washington DC was no easy feat. But, they did it. Arriving at the nation’s Mall and the NMAI was a historic moment, with the Haudenosaunee flag flying high. “We did it,” he said, “we came from our capital to yours to see the historic treaties.” And they had even brought water from the spring on the Onondaga Nation land to water the tobacco plants in front of the museum.

treaties2 — Edwards and his father and co-paddler, Noah Onheda examine the treaties made from Nation to Nation at the NMAI exhibit that opened September 21, 2014

Now back home for almost the first time this summer, Hickory Edwards is already planning his next big trip. From kayak races on the Onondaga creek, to a Peacemakers’ journey, to joining the Two Row on the Grand River in Canada next summer, Edwards paddles to revitalize our awareness that clean water is important. “The circle of life starts out with the next generation looking up at us from the earth,” he explained. “They grow and live and return to the earth. But there is one constant throughout, and that is water. Waterways are the veins of our Mother Earth.”

And it is along those life-giving waterways that Hickory Edwards will continue his personal quest.

August 20, 2014September 2, 2014

What’s Your Susquehanna Story?

The Principal Investigators of the Stories of the Susquehanna initiative are pleased to announce the launch of the “crowd sourcing” platform for the river. As a public humanities project, the Stories of the Susquehanna initiative invites members of the public to submit their Stories of the Susquehanna for possible inclusion. If you have a story about the cultural, historical, or environmental significance of the place where you live in along the Susquehanna River, we’d love to hear from you! What’s your story?

August 13, 2014September 2, 2014

Discussing the Untranslatable and World Literature

In case anyone wonders what academics do during the summer, read on! This week, the Program in Comparative Humanities is hosting a faculty reading seminar on the topics of Untranslatability and World Literature. We are nearing the halfway mark. If you want to take a look at the course outline, readings, discussions, and my thoughts, look here. This is definitely a work in progress, but the discussions we are having are lively!

Thanks to the Provost’s office at Bucknell University for providing the funding for this event. We have been holding summer reading seminars in Comparative Humanities since the inception of the program in 2001. Topics have included Film and Adaptation, Translation, Integrating Islam into Core Courses, the Philosophy of Place, Close Reading, Digital Humanities, and this year, Untranslatability.