Conference Anxieties

This past October, I attended the Western History Association Conference in Newport Beach, California for the first time. It was also the first time I experienced Imposter Syndrome to a great extent, met scholars whose books I read in class (and subsequently tried not to geek out or embarrass myself too much in front of them), and attended many lectures and panels that left me inspired, intimidated, and informed. 

I had experienced "Imposter Syndrome" before, especially at the beginning of the semester in my classes filled with colleagues that were brilliant and eloquent and well-read. Apparently, the whole feeling and phenomenon are quite common, wherein junior scholars especially feel out of place or as if they don't belong among a group of those they feel to be more prestigious and noteworthy than they are. My office mates and other colleagues have commented on similar feelings and while it is nice to know that other people go through similar emotions, it does not always alleviate the feeling. In seminars, it could prevent you from talking and, in a conference setting, it becomes all too apparent how lackluster your elevator speech (essentially a short summary of your research during networking opportunities) is compared to everyone else. As one of the few Master's students in attendance (and the only first year's Master's student from UNM), this feeling hit me pretty hard. The people at the conference, however, were nothing but supportive and many expressed excitement at my attendance even though I was just starting out. As I got more comfortable at the conference, I was able to recognize my own place there as a junior scholar, just starting out, but with potential, which allowed me to interact and engage with others at a better degree than I had been.

We all start out as junior scholars at some point, and while it is important to recognize the hard work and prestige of those that are ahead of you, it is also important to acknowledge that they were in your position once. It still may be too intimidating to talk to scholars whose books you've read (entire conversations were had among UNM graduate students about how to best approach such scholars, if it should be done at all, and how to not appear insane or obsessive or just plain silly while talking to them). It can happen, and, hopefully, whatever scholar you are talking to won't snub you (they probably won't), but there are still paths to navigate in approaching seasoned academics and striking up a conversation (it's basically like trying to talk to someone attractive at a bar--or so I would imagine, were I not engaged--but scarier and more intimidating). 

Unfortunately, Imposter Syndrome is rather inevitable for anyone starting an advanced degree and for many who attend conferences. However, as I learned at the conference and will probably have to reinforce from time to time, the feeling shouldn't stop you in your tracks and send you packing. It should inspire you to do better, to reach that level of scholar one day. And, of course, it is always important to acknowledge that, if you are pursuing an advanced degree, you were chosen for a reason. As many can attest, graduate school can be quite competitive, and your place in a program is no accident. The department and its faculty had faith in you, just as, I'm sure, so do your friends and family and even your colleagues. It is important to remember this and remember not to lose faith in yourself. 

Digital_Humanities, Critical Reaction #6: Critical Review of Digital Projects in the American West

Unfortunately, there are not many Digital Humanities projects out there (at least none that I could find) that specifically deal with the American Southwest at the turn of the century or the medical field in this area. Generally, many of the more prominent projects follow more popular historical topics, such as war histories. A great deal of the Digital Humanities projects that I was able to find specifically addressed literature and text mining in specific texts of famous authors or notable figures in history which, while interesting, do not help my research or focus area out much. There are a few tools which can be useful for teaching, such as Lacuna Stories, tools which discuss digital cultures, such as Challenging Methods or research tools, such as HathiTrust which will prove useful on a general level, but, again, projects specifically dealing with my research interests of women in the American West at the turn of the century and traditional and professional medicine in the Southwest were few and far between. 

That being said, I did find a few notable projects that either slightly qualify as Digital Humanities or are very amazing projects that, while not very widespread, at least indicate ways that the field can expand into the Digital Realm.

The first, most readily available Digital Project are archival projects which contain numerous accessible documents. There are numerous kinds of archival projects available, but the one most relevant to my work is found with the New Mexico Digital Collections. This site features a fantastic searchable archive from collections across New Mexico and is a great way to get started on looking for primary sources for any project. I've used this before and will definitely use it again, and while the project itself does not have any larger purpose beside provide access to these collections, the site as a whole is fairly notable. Not only are all of the sources free to access, the overall search terms needed to locate certain documents seems fairly well put together, which, unfortunately, can't be said for all digital archives.

I have found two other Digital Humanities projects that deal with my research, both of them for medical history. The first is the Text Analysis and Topic Modeling of Martha Ballard's diary. Ballard was  midwife in Maine who kept a daily record of her life between 1785 and 1812. As the article linked above discusses, after cleaning the text to have a readable OCR that could be analyzed with topic modeling, a lot of useful information about the life of Ballard and the daily life of a midwife was revealed, even though some of the findings initially seemed mundane. This kind of analysis takes the information provided by digital tools and provides more context to what is initially provided, such as the frequency of housework being mentioned in her journals, for example, and discusses the changes of these kind of entries over time within the context of the time period. Not only is a remarkable understanding revealed of Ballard's life (that of a general married woman in Maine at this time), it also provides great insight into the life of a midwife and how they thought about and went about their practice. While similar diaries as complete as Ballard's are rare, there is potential in the field to take such practices and apply them to other works and daily records to analyze and understand daily life. Changes in frequency of words, further, can reveal just as much as words that are repeated most often. This project, as a whole, is a wonderful example of the kind of work needed in treating a historical document and the kind of information that can be mined from it.

The final project I wish to discuss is the Voluntary Hospital Database which, again, deals with medical history. This database provides searchable information about hospitals and healthcare from the 1890s to 1940s and presents a map which features the placement and change of amount of hospitals over time, which can be utilized to discuss the rise of professionalization in medicine and an increasing reliance upon science and professional medicine in a medical facility, as opposed to traditional healing or healing in the home. The project itself focuses on hospitals in the British Isles and while the research on display does not help me at the moment, the project can be applied to the geographic location I am studying and try to investigate similar changes and information. So, while this project isn't immediately useful to me now, in the future, possible projects along these same lines will greatly improve what kind of analysis I can provide of the intersection of traditional and professional medicine and how they interacted over time across categories of race, class, and gender, especially in areas with not as easily accessible forms of professional healthcare.

Again, I really was not able to find many Digital Humanities project that exactly pertained to my field. I was fairly pleased to find things that dealt with medical history and can be applied to future work in the field, but it seems that projects dealing with the Southwest or women in the Southwest are sparse. In the future, many of these projects can be more refined and broaden out their focus to encompass more interests and information. If anything, what the field needs most is expansion. The projects that I have selected really do seem to accomplish their intended goals fairly well, and the biggest notes of improvement are for expansion and to have more projects to look at to discuss and enhance the field.

New projects should be following along the lines of what these projects have done in utilizing digital tools to enrich the forms of scholarship available. If anything, more maps dealing with the Southwest that attempt to discuss or present complex ideas, such as the intersection of health and transportation in the West with TB at the turn of the century, or even information to discuss the racial composition of different areas during points of immigration, such as the Gold Rush, would be useful. Also, in general, I really would like to see more continuation of topic modeling projects that also seek to increase the availability of primary documents with clean OCRs, which can be used for further analysis and investigation. While more documents are being digitized and made available online, many still have to be printed out for any real analysis to take place and cannot be read by technology to reveal any other information outside of what can be gained from reading the text at face value.

I don't think this lack of sources or projects really is a bad thing, if anything, it is a note for improvement and acknowledgement that as scholarship progresses, we will probably see more projects similar to those mentioned above pop up. It is fairly exciting to know that while there isn't a lot out there now, current historians can make the next big contribution to enhance and enrich the field. As our technology becomes more advanced, so too, will our understanding and use of it to produce some extremely exciting digital projects and forms of digital scholarship.

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 12/1

This past week was a pretty notable week for failure blogs. Not only was I having trouble even completing the smallest command with Python, during my presentation, I realized that I forgot to format my website to a standard size so it will display correctly. If ever there was a moment where I felt like I had egg on my face, it was then.

But, it is the final week of the semester, so there is hardly room to let this hold me back. After struggling for hours on trying to get Python to do something, I finally managed to get it to replace some typos in a text file of a manuscript. I don't think I've ever felt more accomplished, to be honest. I don't entirely know what I was doing wrong, but I figure it was in the way I was going about trying to put the code in and get it to do what I wanted to do.

My first mistake was trying to do too much at once. For this portion of my portfolio, I forgot that the majority of our contributions must be done in small parts. Every step definitely counts and is definitely needed in order to make sure it goes through alright and accomplishes the assignment. So, after struggling with that very notion that I had to slow down and take it piece by piece, it was a lot of trying to figure out what string of code actually worked and what would be best to try to accomplish my goal. Of course, it involved a lot of Google searches for trying to figure out the benefits of opening a file in writing versus reading mode, for example.

As for the formatting on my website, I am still trying to go through to get it to work. Unfortunatley, "vw" and "vh" as recommended in class are not yet compatible for other browsers, so I've been removing width and height specifications and using percentages where I need to instead of pixels. It still is ridiculously stressful and takes far too long, in part because it displays fine on my laptop, but I have to constantly go back and forth between that laptop and an older one owned by my family to see if it shows up alright. I've gotten mixed results, but I suppose so long as it isn't too wonky, it will pass for now. It is rather hard to let things go, however, mostly because I've worked in graphic design before and as a naturally organized (and slightly Type A) person, it's hard for me to not want all elements of the page to align perfectly. I chose the design of my website for organization and aesthetic purposes, but it seems that choice is shooting myself in the foot.

Either way, I'll have things ready by the end of the week. It is just taking longer than usual to try to get everything fixed and redo a lot of my CSS code.

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 11/23: Like Riding a Bike... Sort of

It seems that putting together my Digital Humanities Portfolio is a series of really small steps that will hopefully form a cohesive whole over the next two weeks. At the start of every day, I always intend to build an entire page or section to cross it off of the requirements list, but there are smaller things that first need to be constructed before I can begin to work on an actual part of the project. For example, this past weekend, I spent most of my time building the HTML pages not just for my research and general website, but also for a landing page for the portfolio itself, making sure to construct directories that I can then just insert the information I need as soon as it is available. This is a needed step, I will admit, but it's interesting how this portfolio has really become a collection of really small additions and cannot be rushed for that very same reason.

However, I do seem to have a general layout for my pages, which makes it easier to construct the different sections using slightly modified css style sheets and streamlines the process a bit. Hopefully, once I start putting together the other aspects of my portfolio, it should be simple to adapt my already established pages to display what I need it to in order to meet requirements.

At the moment, outside of this HTML triumph (or potential triumph), I am currently trying to work with QGIS and get it to display data. This is more frustrating than what I anticipated; I have a vague memory of loading data and a map into the program and displaying things, but I feel like I am relearning how to use the program all over again at the same time (I'm also reminded how much I really dislike the program as a whole). I've spent far too long trying to figure out how to use OpenLayers to display a map and now I can't seem to figure out how to get it to focus on Albuquerque. Again, it seems this addition to my portfolio will be another series of small additions as opposed to one large contribution. We'll see how this goes.

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update: 11/17

This week, in addition to general work on the ABQ Airport project and my portfolio, I mostly focused on working on my research trailer. The first draft of this product is below.

Overall, during this process, I was reminded of a few things. First, regardless of how familiar you might be with making videos, using any new program to edit film is going to take a while to get used to. I have made videos before and had become quite familiar with a video editing program called Roxio. However, this research video was created using Adobe Premiere, a program I had not used before. I assumed that I would be able to utilize the software with little to no issues, but I quickly realized that this small change from one video editing program to another would take some adjustment. Once I got the hang of the program (although I am still learning), it got easier to put the video together, but it served as a reminder that any new program or tasks requires adjustment. This resonates with all of the new forms of technology we've been learning over the course of the semester -- familiarity with technology or a certain type of technology does not always guarantee a universal understanding. I'm sure I'll have to keep this in mind in the future as I progress in my work in Digital Humanities and continue to build my online portfolio.

The biggest frustration I faced with my research trailer was accessing and finding images to include. My research topic isn't too well documented in images and I found myself pulling from related as opposed to directly linked photos to at least try to convey my message. In the future, given more time, I'd like to try to have photographs that are directly associated with my topic and what I am talking about and have more integration between what I am saying in the narration to what is being displayed on the screen. After this project, I do want to continue making similar videos about my research and general information for the public, and so this is important to keep in mind moving forward.

While this week wasn't filled with my general level of frustration, I still was able to pull valuable lessons away from this video project and keep in mind what I can do in the future to improve similar endeavours. It's not exactly a failure as it is an acknowledgement of a learning process that is sure to continue over subsequent years.

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 11/10: Keep Moving Forward

I don't know if everyone else feels this way, but, most likely due to the fast-approaching end of semester, I feel extremely behind in all of my work for this course. I've been completing the assignments and am diligently and frantically trying to meet all of the requirements for the portfolio, but I can't shake this feeling. I'll be going to the after-class meetings starting next week to try to get on the same page as everyone else and will devote as many hours as I can to actually making progress on the ABQ Airport project, my portfolio, and my research video this weekend, but I still feel pretty stretched for time. I don't know what the end result will be of all of this frantic working, but I hope there is a light at the end of the tunnel and whatever I produce will at least be adequate and satisfying. 

Regardless, I've been working on my portfolio and website as of late. I decided to try to completely revamp the design. It took a bit longer than anticipated, and I spend an embarrassingly long amount of time trying to figure out why my visited link colors were not updating. Apparently I just misspelled "visited" and forgot to add an "i." Spelling definitely counts in HTML and proofreading is a necessity. After jumping that ridiculous hurdle, I'm updating the other pages to now match the design and it's been slow progress, but still, progress none the less. Eventually, I should be able to actually add more content and fill the general requirements of the portfolio before the semester deadline hits. 

The ABQ Airport Project is going just as well as my portfolio, where I've been making small discoveries and baby steps to actually putting something together of value. I've been collaborating with the ABQ Museum to try to get a copy of the Oral History video to put online of Harry Davidson, but there was an error in trying to find a jumpdrive big enough to hold the file. I'll be going back on Monday with an external hard drive to get a copy once and for all. Hopefully during one of the get togethers after class, I can try to organize my work with everyone else's and prepare for Friday's deadline. 

Either way, this weekend is going to be pretty full of work, both digital and non. I don't imagine the workload will decrease anytime soon as well, so I guess the only thing I can really do at this point is keep moving forward. That's not exactly a positive message to end it on, but I am making progress. As of now, I've yet to really run into any technical roadblocks, outside of trying to figure out how to have a dropdown menu bar on my website and make the page resizeable, which I'm sure can be solved with some Googling, but the night is still young. 

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 11/3: Small, But Successful Progress

I still feel like I am behind in Digital Humanities, in part because I am still working on my website and portfolio and balancing that progress with my research on the Albuquerque Airport. It can be a bit overwhelming and time consuming, and considering the semester is very quickly coming to a close, it is no surprise that I feel this way. However, I finally seem to have made a breakthrough with my Albuquerque Airport research.

I found an oral history video of Harry Davidson as conducted by the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. Davidson is a local expert on airports in Albuquerque, and this video reflected that. While he does focus on all airports as opposed to just the Sunport and the fact that my initial question of "What does the Albuquerque Airport mean to people?" is still unanswered, I'm honestly very pleased with this progression. I think it will pair rather nicely with a page about the general history of the airport and at least gives some insight to why the airport is important.

Of course, I'm still struggling with finding good oral histories to use, so I am going to stick with collecting newspaper clippings that concerned the airport and putting them together on a webpage, most likely grouping them by theme, similar to Maggie, Candolin, and Kaveh's project, but with text as opposed to images. It can still be a tad interactive and tells personal stories as filtered through the newspapers at the time and at least attempts to find the local voice contained in oral histories.

So far, so good. I'll be working on that this weekend and also updating my website, working on my portfolio, and making my trailer as the weekend and week progresses.