Katie Faull
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.
In his opening talk of the Herrenhausen conference on the Digital Humanities (#dighum1213), Jeffrey Schnapp proposed that the future of the world as a hot spot might be one that is punctuated by increasingly sought after cold spots, places where we are not connected by the digital transfer of data, where we as humans can trust our own senses to make decisions about what it is we see, hear, smell, feel, and express verbally. Rejecting the curation of nature as one that might involve pinning QR codes to trees, Schnapp instead called for another way to make data matter in the human weaving together of narrative to make places meaningful. Digital ecologies, as he termed them, might consist not of us experiencing nature mediated by the digital (sorry, no Google Glass on the Buffalo Valley Rail Trail!) but rather by the human observer using the digital device to collect and record data that later is uploaded in what he termed a crowdsourcing of the environment. Citizen science produces knowledge, much as for Luis von Ahn, human computation digitizes millions of books through the use of that annoying Captcha. Continue reading “Curating the Cold Spots…”
Finally home from a week in Europe that has been a crash course in DH. Actually it’s been a crash course in the issues around DH, the opportunity to see some really cool projects, to think about how the digital in humanities has the power to shift the paradigm, and also to hear how some within the field really don’t want that shift and would prefer that the digital remains a tool rather an epistemology.
On the second day of the Herrenhausen conference, “(Digital) Humanities Revisited–Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Age,” Julia Flanders’ presented her thoughtful inquiry into the connection between art and data and pointed out the false dichotomy between conceptualizing the digital as delimited by the pixel, and analog art as constituting an infinite spectrum of creativity. The dichotomy fails, she argued, if we think of art as it has been aesthetically theorized, namely, as play within constraints. These constraints can be generic, formal, and linguistic. In the same way, what we think of as the infinite play of signifiers in the process of semiosis, in the making of meaning, is also delimited by sign, signifier, and receptor. Flanders identified the real problem with the pixel as not lying then within its boundedness but rather in the lack of connection between pixel and pixel, its positionality and lack of artistic intentionality. In a deftly strategic turn to the textual from the visual, Flanders sees encoded text as being able to retain far more of (the verbal icon’s) signification. Referring to Johanna Drucker’s work on digital aesthetics, Flanders led us to a notion of xml encoded TEI that is richer and more multidimensional than the Madonna rendered in a bitmap image. Continue reading “data and art: intention and chance #dighum1213”
Xaver has passed, the Digital Humanists gone, Herrenhausen Palace has served us its last sumptuous and definitely not virtual repast of venison and salmon, and still the questions remain unanswered.
Why the digital in DH? Why mark this category in a way that is left unmarked in the social or natural sciences? Could the digital denote a departure from what Gregory Crane calls the “monastic” humanities where value is set through publishing specialized articles in paid journals that are read by the same 50 people? Does the digital denote the need for humanists to be morally engaged, to recognize the imperative of making digitized content useable by the public and thus presenting us with a new editing task that recognizes the profound, wide appeal of detailed knowledge? Crane would say yes, please. Let us move away from the a model of the humanities that hides us away and rediscover the roots of citizen science as espoused by the founder of the University of Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Continue reading “Marked or Unmarked? Defining the (Digital) Humanities at #dighum1213”
In the last two days, Hurricane Xaver descended on north west Europe with a vengeance, complete with snow, gales, and floods, accompanying the intellectual storm that unleashed itself on us in the reconstructed Herrenhausen Palace. The venue is in many ways a fitting spatialization of the quandaries of the Digital Humanities. A semblance of Baroque exterior, carefully reconstructed from the ruins left by a British fire bombing in 1942, covers a hyper-modern, minimalist interior, where the surface whiteness of an Apple simulacrum hides the doors and openings of necessary bathrooms and waste bins. Continue reading “Hannover and the Hurricane of Digital Humanities #dighum1213”
Dodging picket lines and security alerts (aka a typical London day) Param Bedi (Bucknell’s VP for L and IT) and I made it through a labyrinth of alleys and courtyards yesterday afternoon to University College, London’s Centre for Digital Humanities to meet with Professor Melissa Terras, its director and co-founder. I was really interested to meet her to talk about how to go about creating a vibrant network of DH both at Bucknell and beyond, and also to see how my own work on Moravians fits well into this marriage of the old and new.
Today I set out on a week-long trip that will take me to familiar places to meet lots of people doing new things with old stuff. In many ways, I have been doing new things with old stuff for a while. Working with manuscript materials all my academic career, I have always wanted to find ways to make what had been stored away in acid free boxes on shelves in archives more accessible to the public. And print publishing has not always been the answer. For example, no-one was interested in publishing a parallel dual language text of the memoirs back in the 90s, and so I tried on-line publishing (see the Moravian Women’s Memoirs experiment that I started back in the days of HTML in the late 1990s). More recently, I have been able to discuss and publish the 18th century maps of the Susquehanna River I have found in archives in both print media (the Journal of Moravian History and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography) and also through some of the online work I have been doing with students on the river. To accomplish the latter, we are in the process of building an “atlas” of the river that will include its historical and critical cartography (the subject of Steffany Meredyk’s Honors thesis, for example).
Over the last three and half years, I have been working with Steffany Meredyk, Class of 2014, on the Cultures at the Confluence project. What started out as a mainly textually based project to transcribe and translate the Moravian mission diaries from Shamokin, Pa has turned into a far more complex and rewarding investigation into the limits and challenges associated with spatial representation in historical narratives. In our collaboration, Steffany and I have grappled with the question of how to represent cartographically the lived experience of those who traversed the Susquehanna Country in the mid-18th century. While I was working on creating the textual edition of the diaries, Steffany started taking courses on GIS. One of the first maps she produced, in a class with Prof. Duane Griffin, shows her early engagement with critical GIS, following the models presented by Margaret Pearce in her work on indigenous mapping.[1] Steffany drew on archival materials to embed the observations of Sullivan’s troops into the map she drew to depict the advance of the campaign to eradicate the Iroquois along the North Branch of the Susquehanna River in 1779. As she writes: “During the American Revolutionary conflict, the Iroquois Indians gave divided military support to American colonists and the British loyalists. As a result General George Washington ordered General John Sullivan in May 1779 to invade Iroquois Country, destroy Indian villages, and burn all food crops or potential resources for Indian war parties or communities. Sullivan’s troops destroyed nearly 60 Indian villages from June through October 1779. Behind him, he left not only a path of physical destruction but also a decimation of Native American communities and cultural systems that can be argued to be systematic genocide… “This map represents where Sullivan’s main army marched and the villages and places that it decimated in the summer of 1779. The troops began their march in Easton, Pennsylvania and follow the North Branch of the Susquehanna River up to the Finger Lakes area in present-day New York. Journal entries of military officers in Sullivan’s army embedded along the war path tell narratives of the journey and shed light on the perspectives of the men during the American Revolutionary Era. Through the journal entries, of Sullivan’s warpath, and the inclusion of quotations, this map provides insight into the great devastation of Iroquois country and the minds of the men who ravaged it.”
In the summer of 2012, supported by funds from the Chesapeake Conservancy, Steffany and another student, Bethany Dunn ’14 worked on a mapping project on the main stem of the Susquehanna River between Harrisburg and Sunbury. This project was far more ambitious: to map the river not as a continuous geographical feature but rather as a segmented and complex corridor of fear. The mid-eighteenth century saw the multiple murders of both Indians and settlers along the river, the most notorious of these being the Paxton Boys massacre of the Susquehannock Indians at Conestoga and the Frederick Stump murders on Middle Creek. Steffany set out to represent the increasingly racialized politics of the Pennsylvania Backcountry, again drawing on manuscript maps, archival materials, journals, letters, and broadsheets to map the complexity of human experience. This draft is currently the subject of Steffany’s Honors thesis in Geography at Bucknell University.
Repeatedly in the Moravian mission diaries we find entries that read, “We went visiting …” or, “We spent the morning visiting….” What might on the surface appear to be a casual reference to an extreme sociability of the Moravian missionaries is however a reference to the pastoral practice of the “Besuch” or visit. An important part of Moravian pastoral care in the towns and in the mission field was to visit both those who were already members of the Gemeine, and also those who were not. And, as Moravian pastoral care in the colonial period also required that men speak to men and women speak to women, as much as was possible, then both members of couples such as Martin and Anna Mack, missionaries at Shamokin, or Anna Margarethe and Johann Jungmann, missionaries at Shekomeko, NY were active in this practice. The Moravian sisters were also not just present to speak to the Native American women in German or English. They were present because they were frequently the ones who possessed the linguistic skills to interpret and translate from German or English into Mohican, Delaware, Oneida, Seneca. For example, both Anna Mack and Anna Jungmann spoke the languages of the Native Americans living around the mission settlements. Anna Mack had learned to speak Mohican from the neighbors to her father’s farm in upstate New York. Anna Margarethe Jungmann had learned to speak Mohican (and later Delaware/Lenni Lenape) when she had first been sent out into the mission field.
The practice of the “visit” could be seen as laying a foundation for the discursive practice of the “Speaking” that was the subject my my last post (and the lectures at Moravian seminary). The repeated “bringing into words” of the personal experiences of loss and redemption, despair and hope were linked to the physical or somatic manifestations of spiritual states; and this self-expression (a hallmark of both Pietist and many Native American world-views) was encouraged and practiced in all senses of the word in the Moravian world of the eighteenth century, whether the subject was English, German, Mohican, Delaware, Igbo, or Inuit.
One could ask the question, if this “Speaking” was so practiced, then could it also be authentic? In what ways can a formulaic genre also be a personal expression of selfhood? This is kind of question we will be tackling next semester.[2]
[1] From “Brother Martin Mack’s Journal from the 13th September 1745 N.S. of his Journey and Visit to Shamoko.” Papers of Martin Mack, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA.
[2] It is also one that I have grappled with in my essay on the use of “parrhesia” in the Moravian discursive world, “Speaking and Truth-Telling: Parrhesia in the eighteenth century Moravian Church” in Self, Community, World: Moravian Education in the Transatlantic World, eds. Heikki Lempa and Paul Peucker (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2010), 147-167.
In October 2011, I was fortunate enough to be invited to Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, Pa to deliver the Moses Lectures. The topic was the Moravian practice of the Speakings, monthly conversations that each member of the church had with the Choir Helper (spiritual leader) of the group or Choir to which he or she belonged. Ones membership in a choir was determined by marital status, gender, and age. In my earlier post I talked about how one reaches the point of being able to write an authentic memoir. In the 18th century, the Moravian Church prepared each member of the Church for such self-writing through this system of the Speakings. The lectures are divided into two parts. Part One focuses on the history of the Speakings; Part Two focuses on the Instructions (1786) that describe how to conduct the Speakings. I have transcribed and translated the Instructions and am preparing to publish them in the series “Pietist and Anabaptist Studies” from Pennsylvania State University Press. This work was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The text of these lectures was published in “The Hinge: International Theological Dialog for the Moravian Church,” vol. 18, No. 2: Spring 2012.
Moravian Studies and Digital Thinking and Praxis 