… promoting long term student-faculty (and community) collaboration in the Susquehanna Valley
This is the transcript of the paper that Diane Jakacki and I presented on July 9, 2014 at DH2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland. We are currently expanding this paper into an article for publication. The PowerPoint slides that accompanied our presentation are included at the end of this post.
INTRODUCTION
At several sessions and discussions at the 2014 Digital Humanities Summer Institute we noticed a marked increase in discussions focusing on teaching Digital Humanities; namely, how do we effectively port the tools and methodologies with which we work as researchers into the undergraduate classroom. Simultaneously, the question gradually shifted from “DO we teach Digital Humanities to undergraduates?” to “HOW do we teach Digital Humanities to undergraduates?”
At the first “Birds of a Feather” session at DHSI on Tuesday afternoon, chaired by our very own Diane Jakacki, the question posed was “Who are we and where are we going?” A pertinent question indeed, as the auditorium designed for the opening session could not hold the over 600 people who had come this year to University of Victoria for a week-long intensive foray into classes, flash talks, discussions, and meetings on the Digital Humanities.
I am at DHSI to attend a seminar designated for Deans and Chairs (in a room in which there might be the only people with grey hair) to try to learn about the problems of creating, sustaining, evaluating and growing DH at an institute of higher learning. My classmates are from large public and private R1s, and smaller Liberal Arts colleges, from the US, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, and we are all tasked with the question of reading about and discussing the problems of defining DH, evaluating it, developing it, and facing the challenges and rewards of collaborative DH work with faculty and students (and of course graduate students) in our various educational environments. Then, we are sent off to audit as many classes as possible, ranging from the Fundamentals of TEI (text markup language) to Drupal for DH, to GIS (know where I’ll be heading…), basic programming, database development, and physical computing (getting the internet to talk to physical objects) inter alia. On Friday, the group reconvenes to discuss how such digital knowledge might be embedded within the teaching and scholarship of our various institutions.
Since its inception, Stories of the Susquehanna has been a collaborative, interdisciplinary digital project that has at its core a geospatial interface. What started out as historical/cultural mapping of the Native American landscapes of the Susquehanna in ArcMap Desktop with maps published in static image format (as discussed in the interviews of me and Emily Bitely) has evolved through the iterations of ESRI’s software development.
About a week ago, one of our Digital Scholarship Coordinators and SSV project manager, Diane Jakacki pointed to to the fact that ESRI was now publishing apps. At first skeptical, I proceeded to delve further into the Collector app and battled my way through tutorials designed for insurance adjusters gathering data in the field (no, I don’t need fields labeled “Habitable” or “Partially Destroyed”) to create a feature layer that could be added to any map in ArcMap online. This feature layer was supposed to be able to both locate you in the field and allow you to input field data in real time at the same time as giving you access to the rich data associated with points and lines in pop-ups. The new feature layer could also permit the attachment of photos and video.
My co-PI, Alf Siewers and I had been discussing over the last few months how we could best create this kind of mobile interface and had been in long discussions with both Diane and Andy Famiglietti as to how this might happen. This app seemed to me to offer us a ready made way to send our students out into the field to collect data, upload it, and also see it within the context of the historical information that had already been collected.
Add Feature window showing the fields and photo upload option
After some tussling with an outdated version of ArcMap (10.0 vs. 10.2) and successfully navigating our excellent ArcMap Online resources, I was able to author and upload a prototype of a multi-layered interactive map of the Susquehanna watershed that had the mobile features I wanted (well, almost). However, one field caused the app to crash repeatedly and I knew I had to re-author it in Desktop.
Enter my Presidential Fellow, Steffany Meredyk. Today, as almost a final collaborative act after four years of working together, Steffany and I worked out the problem; now we can test out an interactive crowdsourcing feature layer for online maps of the Susquehanna this weekend on the North Branch Kayaking Sojourn. Whoops of joy were detectable…. but not uploaded…
The Collector app has a rich potential for data gathering in the field. Whether to record information on bird populations, the state of repair of the rail-trail, tracking plant coverage, or encouraging crowdsourcing of local history, this is an exciting and versatile digital step forward in our work of bringing the Stories of the Susquehanna alive.
How do you represent visually relationships between people and places that are, I have discovered, unmappable. Only in this last week, under the gun of a deadline thrice removed, did I finally realize that this is what I have been trying to do. Still working on a chapter for a book on Pennsylvania’s Babel of the 18th century, I needed to find a way to describe the dynamic and complex way in which not only Native peoples but Moravians, men and women, communicated and travelled in mid-18th century Pennsylvania. This is an important realization as, within the traditional historiography of this period, both Native and Euro women were just elided. More recently, the focus has turned to Native women in in terms of their agency and mobility. However, what I have been wanting to discuss is how a group of women who were active as missionaries in the Moravian mission field of the 18th century brought with them their expertise from either Europe or the early settlements in New York State and Pennsylvania to effect a translation of culture and knowledge here on the Susquehanna River.
The source materials I have been working with for this chapter are predominantly unpublished, or, if published, reside in 18th century Fraktur imprints. Seemingly straightforward questions, such as birth dates and places, require lengthy investigations of manuscript sources or typed up lists of information taken from the Geburts- und Tauf Register of the Bethlehem communty (also unpublished) or other missions. Spreadsheets of names, dates, places that I have put together over the years have helped in these investigations. And in this quest I was to find out that this accounting of data over the last 25 years would help more than I could have imagined.
I have wanted to map the way in which these women lived and worked (in German I would use the verb “agieren”) in the mid-Atlantic. I wanted to show how their lived lives became an integral part of the warp and weft of the environment of the Pennsylvania backcountry. But to do that I had to also delve into why they were here, what brought them to this place at this time? How did they translate the skills, experiences, concepts of self that had been learned in the Pfalz, Germany, or a village near Oxford, England, or a farm close by the Mohican villages in upstate New York to the banks of the Susquehanna or the Lehigh rivers?
I started to make maps. Firing up my GIS layers, I mapped the missions, I mapped the women, I inserted date ranges. But it still was static. It didn’t show the movements of the women between the missions over time in an effective way (maybe because I am not as skillful at this as my students…) Then, staring at the DH Humanities list from my alma mater King’s College, London, I saw the announcement of palladio in beta out of Stanford. Assuming that this was a happy by-product of the well-known and ground-breaking project “Mapping the Republic of Letters” I decided to “dive in.”
When I first started working on the Moravian women’s memoirs 25 years ago I was surprisingly data driven. I wanted to know who these fascinating and diverse people were. One of the places in Bethlehem that inspired me to work on the Pietist group was the “Gottesacker” with its flat gravestones that are ordered in terms of marital status, age and gender and not by social ranking or racial group. I found the register of the Gottesacker and built a database of all the women who were buried there, found information about their birthplace, dates, brief biographies. When I looked at how data was supposed to be entered into Palladio, I thought this would be a good first project. With the help of my research assistant, Hein Thun, we entered all the exact locations of birth and death in longitude and latitude and then I entered this into the online program. What came out was good. A mapping of places from which the Bethlehem women came in the 18th century, both in terms of a geo-location and also a very basic visualization.
First visualization in Palladio of Moravian women’s birth placesInitial Palladio mapping of Moravian women’s birth places
Having had some success with this visualization I wanted to try it with the missions and missionary women. But I couldn’t get it to show what I wanted. I was still too hung up on mappy maps.
It wasn’t until I talked to Andy Famiglietti, one of the Digital Scholarship co-ordinators at Bucknell, that I realized that I had to think of maps that weren’t maps. I had to remove the “geo” from my spatial thinking to visualize these relationships. This was not easy for me; really, really not easy. I had tried working with Gephi before, but it was only once Andy explained to me the fundamental rule of thinking about networks as relationships between two entities (not three, not four) that I understood why my attempts to date had failed. So, modifying the data, stripping it down to the “edges” of people and places, we were able to visualize what I had been looking for and trying to express in my chapter.
Gephi produced network analysis of relations between Moravian women missionaries in the mid-Atlantic
It was truly a “eureka” moment. Yes, it is not the most elegant, or beautifully rendered visualization. But it showed what I wanted it to show, the strength of relationships between these women and their places of agency.
Curious to see how Palladio might represent this same data I fiddled around that night and came up with another, different, visualization of these people and places.
Using Palladio to visualize relations between Moravian women and mission place
Again, it is not beautiful and I have not fully explored the capacities of Palladio, but it is a beginning. A beginning of mapping without maps, of being able to render visible what has been invisible to date, namely, the strong network of women’s lives in the history of this place.
Two emails in the last week reminded me of my multilingual roots; one from the editor of a volume of essays on colonial Pennsylvania, asking that my quotations from primary sources in my contribution be in the original language (in this case German), and the other from a doctoral candidate in Germany, requesting my help with manuscript materials from the 18th century, also in German. The editor’s request was unusual for me. After years of publishing in scholarly venues where the original non-English language was either elided or banished to the footnotes, after decades of translating materials for those who at conferences smile and say, “Oh, I don’t want to do all that work with the German, I leave it to people like you,” the request to foreground the original was refreshing and surprising.
The problem with both requests was that neither source had been published in German Both reside on my hard drive, carefully transcribed from the German, along with editorial marks to indicate the scribe or author’s deletions and insertions, an editor’s marginalia, re-workings and rewordings. The hundreds of pages of German (all supported by healthy grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities) have constituted an interim stage between original manuscript and printed translation. Occasionally, I have been urged by German researchers to not forget them, but with the pressure to publish in North American scholarly presses (who for the most part abhor the non-English) these requests were answered piecemeal. Until now.
The request for the original German of Margarethe Jungmann’s memoir that I had published in translation nearly 15 years ago in the volume Moravian Women’s Memoirs (Syracuse UP, 1997) spurred me to go back to my transcriptions and decide to make them available on this site. After a few hasty consultations with our Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Dr. Diane Jakacki, and an equally hasty email to the Archivist of the Northern Province, Dr. Paul Peucker to ask permission to publish original materials housed at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, I entered into a frenzy of WordPress posting; adding a submenu for Moravian Materials, a page for the memoirs, entitled Umgang mit dem Heiland with a linked table of contents, and then making a page for each memoir. Over the space of 24 hours, I read through each memoir, line by line, checking the formatting and occasionally modifying the old html from the MS Word files. And posted them.
As I read, the beauty of the authors’ German once again came alive. For most of these women, their mother tongue was German, but a non-standardized German. Many wrote as they spoke, with dialect spellings, so that when read aloud you can almost hear their accented voice, recognize their origin from the Pfalz (Palatinate) or Sachsen (Saxony). And some are more filtered through a “Moravian vernacular,” carefully deploying the tropes and styles of the pietistic community in response to the request to write an account of their lives. How does a woman from LIttle Papaa on the Guinea coast write her life in German? How does a woman born in York, Pennsylvania or Paris, France, or London, England write about her life in what is not her mother tongue? Does the language become flattened into what Gayatri Spivak has termed “translatese” (see her classic essay, “The Politics of Translation”)? Does the imposition of an other tongue violate the subjectivity and identity of the author?
My mother was German. A refugee from the Russian front in 1945, she ended up in Bristol, England as the bride of a British soldier. Britain in the 1950s and 60s was not a very friendly place to Germans or the German language, and so the sound of her mother(‘s) tongue was mostly silenced, spoken only at home, and emerging in brief moments of linguistic naivety when I, unaware that I was not speaking the common vernacular in Herefordshire, England, would utter a word that marked me as “other.” And this linguistic otherness intrigued me. Having multiple words and worlds in which to express myself became a fantastic prism through which to distort and enrich the world around me. Having only one language world was something I could not imagine, and so I acquired more of them. The polyphony of the polyglot is sometimes deafening, a Babel of voices, but it is multidimensional, complex, and exhilarating.
Precisely this polyglot place was here in Pennsylvania in the colonial period. There was English, German, French, Dutch, Swedish, all imported from Europe. But there was also the polyphony of the Native American languages; Iroquoian and Algonquin language groups, fundamentally different and defining the nations of the “New” world. These linguistic worlds intermixed in Pennsylvania along the branches of the Susquehanna, up and down the Delaware and the Schuylkill. As Patrick Erben has examined in his wonderful work, “A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania” (UNC Press, 2012) this multiplicity of languages was not a threat to the harmony of Penn’s “Holy Experiment” but rather its constitutive moment. And new work emerging from conferences like “Envisioning the Old World: Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg and Imperial Projects in Pennsylvania” organized by Dr. Bethany Wiggin of the German Department of the University of Pennsylvania, in 2012 show how the field of German studies in North America is changing. More and more, it encompasses the comparative and the interdisciplinary in its examination of the history and languages of the German Atlantic world. What was once termed “German-American Studies” and looked on with the slight suspicion that it resided only in the “Wurst and Bier” of a Philadelphia or Texas “Deutsches Brauhaus” has developed into an intellectually sophisticated and legitimated mode of inquiry. No longer eliding the (m)other tongue, but rather celebrating Babel, I want to thank the visionary scholars and presses that are making this happen! Prosit!
What can we humanists do to be our discipline’s best advocates? How can we break down the intellectual and class walls that we in the academy have built around ourselves in a time of public critical discourse on the relevance, use, and even worth of our discipline? And how can we employ the tools and community of DH to help us in that outreach and argument? A group of us from Bucknell drove up through the snow and mountains, along interstates all in the 80s, to Union College to attend a fascinating, thoughtful and thought provoking workshop led by Alan Liu, Chair of English at UCSB on the recently released congressional report “The Heart of the Matter.”
Liu had provided us with the text of the report prior to our meeting, complete with his annotations and analyses. Part of our homework was not only to read and analyze the report, but also to see how Liu had employed the tools of “distant reading” or digital discourse analysis to reveal its topics, assumptions and argument clusters. Plugging the text into Voyant, using Taporware to remove the stop words (the, an, that etc) it is possible to quickly construct multiple visualizations of word and concept frequency, word and concept linkage and proximity, and also rhetorical framing. Mobilizing vocabularies of nation and security, public funding and social relevance, civic consciousness and individual enrichment, personal and public memory, the report strikes an odd balance between support for the project of the discipline, and an argument for its deployment in a discourse of national security.
We walked into the gorgeous Nott Memorial building armed with what we thought was a pretty thorough understanding of how this “blue ribbon” group had formulated their approach to getting to the Heart of the Matter. But a few minutes in the presence of the careful, intelligent, and suggestive Liu brought to the fore the way in which he, when faced with the realities of cuts in the UC system, responded to the challenges facing the humanities worldwide. Mobilizing the forces of advocacy, DH, and public humanities, Liu started the website 4humanities and publicized its mission of advocacy in the digital age. Along with the organizer of today’s conference, Professor Christine Henseler, Chair of Foreign Languages at Union, and her page Humanities Plain and Simple, Liu outlined the many and varied forms in which we can all push the humanities to the forefront of the public’s eye.
So, how do the rest of us in the discipline do this? Liu showed us a variety of ways in which we can show off how the humanities makes things. Humanities Infographics to print out and display: create a Humanities Backpack with short videos about the humanities; drive the Humanities bus around the country–yes, a road trip to make videos of why the humanities matter. All these ideas are supported through this network of global and local chapters of 4humanities, stretching from UCSB to UCL which help to develop strategic principles for humanities advocacy.
A central part of the 4humanities project is public outreach. Much in the same way as we in the Stories of the Susquehanna have always made public outreach and public involvement part of our project, so Liu argued for the need to make the connections between what we do in our classrooms and disseminating our work, even through the means of machine readers, through social networks to the public. The authors of the Heart of the Matter had certainly recognized the importance of such public outreach with the suggestion, for example, of the creation of a Culture Corps consisting of volunteers from the community who could bring their expertise on local issues to the classroom. Given the way in which we now have a very different notion of expertise, where the purveyors of knowledge not only reside in the universities or print media, but rather in sites such as Wikipedia where knowledge is crowdsourced, this changing vision of the concept of expertise needs to be recognized and incorporated into the humanities. Moments of discovery, whether a child finding a grandmother’s camisole in an attic trunk, or a Vietnam vet’s recovery of a long hidden memory unearthed while rereading letters home, these are part of the human experience that need to be shared. And, as Liu pointed out, many times the public is surprised to learn that this constitutes the humanities.
Today was a call to action and a gentle reminder that most of us in the discipline are not trained in the fine art of public outreach. To us, working in the Stories of the Susquehanna, it was an affirmation of an integral part of our work in making the humanities the heart of the matter along the banks of the river.
A great deal of the historical and digital work that I have been doing over the last 5 years has been in collaboration with some great colleagues (Alf Siewers at the top of the list!) and students (Emily Bitely and Steffany Meredyk, especially). To get a good overview of this work, please visit the Stories of the Susquehanna website which is now up and running! Hooray!
This evening, in the HUMN 150 class, Art Nature Knowledge, we will use our first mind map, created using Spiderscribe. I hope it works. I will try to add notes as the “scribe” during the class, so that tomorrow we will be able to use this mind map for discussions of the texts.
Today, a Moravian Christmas conjures up images of Herrnhuter stars, carols and candlelit midnight services. But what was Christmas like back in the days of the missions in Pennsylvania, 270 years ago? How did the missionaries celebrate this season of birth and light in the bleak midwinter on the Susquehanna River?
The first Christmas at the Shamokin mission for which we have records was celebrated in 1747 by Martin and Anna Mack and Anton and Catharine Schmidt. In the mission diary, Martin writes of the peace at the confluence on December 25, 1747 where their thoughts are directed towards the congregation in Bethlehem, Pa. At noon on Christmas Day, the four missionaries hold a little love feast for which they had baked bread rolls in the ashes of their fire. In the evening Anna Mack visits Shikellamy’s daughter-in-law, a Mohican woman who was one of the first people around the confluence who truly accepted and loved the Moravians (other than Shikellamy himself). She asks Anna if today were Sunday because the Moravians are so quiet; to this Anna replies, no, it is Christmas Day. The Mohican woman is quite surprised because “the white people usually have a lot of fun on that day. You are definitely a very different kind of people from the white people we know.” Anna agrees with her that the Moravians are very different, with their interiorized mediations on their community and their Savior, in contrast to the carousing of the white traders who live nearby down the river. However, the giving of gifts belongs very much to the Moravian tradition, and that evening Martin and Anna along with Anton and Catharine make a present of turnips to Shikellamy and his family who gratefully receive them.
The peace of the Confluence at Christmastime is however not repeated. A year later, the Macks and Schmidts have left, the Sachem, Shikellamy, has died a few weeks earlier, and Brothers Zeisberger and Rauch are now in charge. Zeisberger writes in the diary of the many visitors to the smithy on the day after Christmas, people from the Delaware and Iroquois nations, as well as Shikellamy’s son, Logan and his family. All are seeking refuge from the drunken people who have invaded their own homes. Also desirous of some peace, they are looking for a place to cook their food. And the Moravian mission house provides just that place!
Christmas at the Confluence 2013
The last Christmas the Moravians spend at Shamokin in 1754 is a time of joyful reunion as Heinrich Frey and Gottfried Rösler are on their return to the mission from their trip to Bethlehem via the Wyoming Valley. Christmas Eve is spent under the stars about 20 miles upriver from Shamokin not far from Lapachpeton’s village at the mouth of the Catawissa Creek. Unable to sleep because of the rain, Frey and Rösler meditate on the meaning of the day under the tent they have made out of their blanket. On Christmas Day, they arrive amid much rejoicing at Shamokin.
As the missions grew along the Susquehanna River, so too did the celebrations of Christmas. Just ten years later, in 1765, at the mission church in what was to become Friedenshütten, the diary records 120 people attending the midnight service. The story of Christ’s birth is read from the Harmony of the Gospels that has been translated into Delaware and the congregation listens intently. The service ends with the congregation kneeling and praying at the Nativity scene that stands in the church. The next year there are 170 at the midnight Christmas Lovefeast. The following year a new musical instrument that has been built at Friedenshütten accompanies the voices at the Christmas Eve service. The next year, candles are distributed to the children at the service for the first time, and thus things begin to look a lot like today’s service at Central Moravian in Bethlehem (with the major caveat that the children are all Native Americans.) By 1770, these same children are all excited at having Christmas vacation off school and being the center of the Christmas service.
In just over 15 years, the celebration of Christmas at the Moravian missions on the Susquehanna had changed from a quiet contemplative night of prayer and sharing of plain food with Native people to a complex midnight service with vocal and instrumental music, candles, and nativity scene, where the readings from a Delaware Gospel might have been the only sign that this was a congregation not of European origin.
Back in 2011, Janine Glathar interviewed me and Emily Bitely ’11 on the ways in which we had used GIS to begin mapping the Stories of the Susquehanna. These originally appeared on the Bucknell GIS blog.
Emily’s work was central to gaining the National Historic Trail designation from the National Park Service.
To learn more about the John Smith Trail, click here.
To view more Captain John Smith’s voyage, click here.
To view a map of interpretive ‘smart’ buoys located in the river, click here.
Moravian Studies and Digital Thinking and Praxis 