Historically Inclined: October 2014

Friday, October 31, 2014

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 10/27: Hitting Walls

I've been progressing through the most recent work in my Digital Humanities course fairly smoothly, so of course, there is some other aspect that is proving difficult. In the class, we are putting together a website about the history of the Albuquerque Sunport, and my initial goal was to find some oral histories that pertained to the topic and shed some light on what the airport meant to different people in Albuquerque. However, as I've discovered, my topic has resulted in more dead ends than a horror movie.

Not only did I hit walls in the difficulties of posting oral histories online, which was one of the reasons why I pursued the topic in the first place, I've also had general complications on finding the oral histories I need. I've yet to find an oral history that specifically addresses the Albuquerque Airport, and half the time, I feel like I'm fishing for small tidbits or soundbites that at least mention the airport and generally come out with nothing useful.

Because of this relative lack of success and overall failure, it has become far too easy for me to put off even working on the project because of the walls I've already hit. While it would be nice to listen to every single oral history in the Center for Southwest Research or spend countless hours shifting through transcripts, it is far easier to put off the useless fishing and work on other, more pressing, and productive work instead.

It wasn't until this week that I really decided to, instead of working through hours of material which may or may not prove useful, broaden out my topic and change my overall goal for the sake of producing at least something small by the end of the semester which is fast approaching. Instead of strictly looking for oral histories, I'm now going to look at newspaper articles and try to find sections which address the airport, which can then be put online either in a PDF/image, transcript, or as a sound recording. It is a bit of a cop-out, but at this point in the semester, I can't really afford to be picky.

This adjustment, I feel reflects in other work in the Digital Humanities. Sometimes, it is better to just reorient your question or whatever attempt you are working on and try something else, or at least expand what you are trying to accomplish. It is a constant cycle of working and reworking until something sticks and works out. The small failures are meant to reorient how we think and adjust our approach in order to eventually achieve success, however small that success might be.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 10/20: Positivity Among Failure

Sinking my teeth into Mallet and Overview was relatively painless. There still were some issues that arose, mostly with directories, but overall, the process of getting to know these tools was easy. I think, after experiencing productive failure so often for the past few months, I have become used to the feeling. Instead of rage quitting when something doesn't work, I backtrack and reconsider what step I skipped or what part of my code threw the computer off. I get frustrated, to be sure, but it isn't as paralyzing as before.

In my first experiment with Mallet, the Command Line did not want to run the program or even list what items were in the directory. It was in my C:\\ drive as instructed, but I was missing the Java installation required to run the program. Similar failures occurred throughout the process, from trying to convert txt files into a readable mallet file as recommended in the Programming Historian tutorial (great tutorial, by the way. I highly recommend it. Check it out here.) to simply listing what was in a specific directory or txt file. But, with patience and a lot of back and forth between the tutorial, the GUI of the mallet directory, and my command prompt, I was able to extract the information I wanted and get some pretty interesting results.

The documents I analyzed were just for the purpose of the exercise and won't help me in my research, but I'm starting to see how text mining might be useful in the future. I guarantee that whatever files I deal with will have to be cleaned to make them suitable for these tools, but it could reveal some interesting connections that I would not have normally considered. If I do come across a large corpus, these tools will enable greater analysis and will also help my own process in understanding exactly how these documents are connected and how they might be useful.

The content of the documents can also be made clearer by such tools as Overview. I did find this tool easier and more appealing than Mallet, in part due to my own avoidance of the Command Prompt (it's a bit hard for me to read the text in this format, even if I open it in a Notepad or Word doc). But, I could see its limitations. The tool is very specific in what it can do with text files and with text modeling. It shows the same strings of words that Mallet does, but a portion of the original connections is lost; Overview breaks down the texts in a greater degree and makes distinct divisions between different documents, which is useful in understanding what kind of files you might be dealing with, but may not reveal as clear distinctions of how they connect or how certain topics are addressed in the material as a whole. This view of Overview might just be to my own novice status with the program, but that was my initial impression none the less.

I still plan to use this tool in the future, but in conjunction with Mallet to see what different information each tool can extract. The user-friendliness helps for this tool as well and can be a great way to initially approach digital tools and text mining, so long as the other programs are not ignored in the long run.

My own preferences and views of these programs aside, I'm starting to feel how much my toolkit has grown over this past semester and how my general understanding and approach to these once foreign tools has developed. It's a good feeling. I still have a long way to go (there are many more failures to make and moments of frustration to experience), but it's a start.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 10/13: A Mess of Words

This post is a bit late, but hopefully no one will really mind too much and forgive the tardiness. I've been playing around with Voyant, Google Ngram, and Bookworm recently. Bookworm remains the most stubborn, but, mechanically, I've been able to adjust to the former two with ease. The question remains, however, of how I will integrate this into my research and if the effort for using such tools will result in adequate payoff.

In Lara Turner O'Hara's post, "Cleaning OCR'd text with Regular Expressions," [link] she discusses the process of cleaning up a text document in order to utilize it as a CSV file. She admits that the input of work needed to clean up text files before they are ready for analysis can be taxing and may not be worth the effort in order to interpret texts without the aid of digital analysis tools. I have to agree with her on this point; in Voyant, I loaded several editions of the Daily Lobo's archives from 1890 - 1910. I've used this collection before for research, and all of the editions available are scanned and searchable by keyword. The PDF files are saved in a format that recognizes text, which is why it worked in Voyant. I attempted to do the same with other newspapers through different online archives, but these PDF files and records did not have the same attributes, illustrating one main problem with using these digital tools. Even if a newspaper is digital and searchable via keyword, the file itself does not guarantee compatibility.

I was expecting this issue, however, so it didn't cause much alarm. For the sake of the exercise, I stuck with the Daily Lobo newspapers and selected several ranging from 1890 - 1910, primarily to see if the issue of New Mexico statehood and enfranchisement of Hispanic males and females was a common topic that fluctuated throughout this period. Neither one of these topics, however, appeared on my word map (though they were contained in individual articles, just not at a high enough frequency to generate interest). Instead, my word map looked something like this:

This prominently displayed the second issue with using such tools and archival material. Not only were more common words, such as "the," featured more prominently than any word that would actually generate interest, the text was read with several errors and errors were throughout. Just because the document was a PDF which recognized text does not mean that it could read the text correctly. This is where cleaning and manipulating data is crucial.

After establishing several stop words that removed common words and errors, my word map started to develop into something significant. It still did not really tell me anything, aside from the limitation of using a university newspaper, which found more references to words such as "varsity" and "university" than events that I found to be significant.

It does, at least, paint a more interesting picture and potentially raises some questions that could encourage further research. The significant frequency of the word "phone," for instance, seems unusual, and while this word does not come close to my original intended query of statehood and suffrage, at least shows how such tools can be useful. As Ted Underwood notes in his blog post, "Where to Start with Text Mining," [link] tools such as Voyant and Google Ngram can provide insights to textual sources which might otherwise be overlooked. This can be the simple generation of a future research question or it could be something more complex that potentially negates historian interpretations and estimations, as my text mining exercise illustrates. I had originally hypothesized that, due to the debate and issue of statehood, there would be a significant frequency of its mention in these records. I was wrong. This could be, in part, due to the editions I chose rather haphazardly and could also be a result of the limitations of the tools. Voyant shows frequency of words, for example, but, unlike Google Ngram, does not display the changing rate that a certain term is mentioned to really see any rising discussion. In my opinion, Voyant is better suited as a tool to look at a wide body of textual documents and see if a pattern emerges; any pre-formed conception or intent should not be the driving force of using this tool. Other text mining tools have their own limitations and strengths which encourage multiple tools in order to analyze the same body of word. Interesting conclusions might be drawn from the results, but there is a lot of work that needs to be completed before any interpretation of data can truly occur.

Cleaning a document, of course, is key. It is a daunting process. In the interest of time, I did not even attempt to clean up the texts I used. For more serious research outside of this exercise, however, I may dabble in this textual cleaning and make the mess of words actually form coherent sentences that can then be analyzed. In spite of the questionable yield of this work, the exercise alone is valuable to any historian. At a very simple level, it can open up new questions and insights. As a community, making such archival documents and information (copyright permitting) available can also enrich the field and allow for further investigation by other historians and digital humanists in a new way. And, if something true does result from text mining that supports your research, it can seem like a truly significant addition to a body of work. Text mining and its uses does need refinement and my own abilities with these tools needs further development, but its potential as a historical tool of analysis is apparent.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Digital_Humanities: Albuquerque Airport Resources and Research

When I interned at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, I completed projects that involved going through oral histories and videos and seeing how they could be used for museum exhibits. I don't know how much of this will be useful to the DH project and course, but I felt it would be best to share what I know for now and see if it can be valuable to anyone else in the class.

Oral Histories

Below are some Oral Histories I looked through with information on what they discussed. These were recorded on cassette tapes, however, which could make it difficult to transfer it online. The heading before each in bold is information about where this was collected. I truncated the text below it to only refer to what would be applicable to the airport. The time period that each one of these oral histories talk about is pretty uncertain, but it seems to be around 1950 - 1970, depending on the person and what they are talking about.

Albuquerque Museum, South Valley Oral History Project, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Item Number: SVP-TP-F28July97. Document: Tape Log. Team: “Valle Grande.” Fieldworker: Tomas Pena. Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico. Informant: Florencio Baca, SVOH. Florencio Baca, South Valley Oral History Project. 28 July 1997. Inter: T. Pena. Miscellaneous Files and South Valley Oral History Project (Indexes of SVOHP). Actual Tape: 2002.025.001, Oral History “General Tapes, Alpha A-L, Box 1 of 2

Tape 1, Side 1

Sandia Base

5:10 Sandia was a fair employer, they never deviated from equal opportunities. When that act came through, we had not problem transitioning because they were already doing that. I worked there for 31.5 years. I started in April 1952

Tape 2, Side 1

197

197 Tower Road was named for the towers used in the 1930s to navigate planes

316

316 Aircraft school. At the old airport, near the Atomic Museum in ABQ, NM

Tape 2, Side 2

517

517 Flew planes as a test mechanic. Flew various planes.

Albuquerque Museum South Valley Oral History Project, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Item Number: SVP-TP-19July97.2. Document: Tape log. Team: “Valle Grande.” Fieldworker: Tomas Pena. Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico. Informant: Vincente Apodaca, South Valle Oral History. 1 Nov. 1996. (Tape originally in Spanish)

Tape 1

292

292 Worked on airport in Albuquerque, for about 3 years

KRQE Channel 13 Collections

These are basically B Roll film of what Channel 13 would show on the news. These were all on VHS, though some have been digitized since then. In general, a lot of the videos lack real content, and are mostly goods as supplements to other information. Most of these took place in the 1970s, I believe. The numbers refer to the minute location in the tape.

Tape 4

Random Informational video about airplanes 39-40

Contains info and footage of the 1^st commercial flight

Not really New Mexican (?)

However, Amela Earhart was on this flight, and she did visit NM

TWA—celebrating old era of transportation

Talks about Amelia Earhart

NM National Guard Claiming Discrimination 124-126

The National Guard in NM has been plagued with other suits and accusations concerning discrimination

Today, an affidavit was filed against Col. Sands for being involved in a cheating scandal

Filed w/ department of airforce

On-going investigation of international guard

Sign reads “Enchilada air force, home of the ‘tacos’”

Tape 5

775 days in prison, man returns home 35-36

See the man getting off the airplane, meeting family

Dedicates his time in prison to NM

Tuesday, July 27, 1971

Reies Tijerina, activist for Hispanic rights and land rights; worked to restore land grant rights to Hispanic and Mexican owners and was part of the chicano movement

Tape 8

Spirit of St. Louis 100-101

Shots of the small aircraft and pilot, John Linberg

Speeches about him

Shots of him doing a photo shoot

Tape 9

Energy Crisis w/ airplanes 28-30

Possibly owner of Sunport talking about how to reduce energy usage @ the airport

i.e. use less aircrafts, have less take off times, use bigger aircrafts with more seats

It shows the Albuquerque Sunport; it is definitely not as developed as it is now, and generally deserted of people and planes

ABQ Women Project

This was a project I did myself where I basically looked up numerous women who were influential for Albuquerque and listed biographical information about them. I generally include information on the sources that I draw from and also list and images from the Albuquerque Museum Photoarchives that have these women in them. These women range across time period and general connection to Albuquerque.

Aviation

Mary Carroll

First Woman Pilot of Albuquerque

Time Period: 1930s

First woman pilot in Albuquerque. She claimed that her first solo flight was “the most thrilling event of her life.”

ABQ Affiliation: ABQ pilot.

Sources:

Balloons to Bombers, Don E. Alberts

Jerrie Cobb

Pilot and Potential Astronaut

Time Period: 1960s

Jerrie Cobb has been flying since she was 12. When she turned 18, she received her Commercial Pilot’s license and went on to earn her Multi-Engine, Instrument, Flight Instructor and Ground Instructor ratings as well as her Airline Transport license. By 19, she was teaching men to fly, and by 21, she was delivering sleek military fighters and four-engine bombers to foreign Air Forces around the world. She went on to set new World Aviation records for speed, distance, and absolute altitude. She became the first woman to fly in the world’s largest air exposition, the Salon Aeronautique Internacional in Paris, her fellow airmen named her Pilot of the Year and awarded her the Amelia Earhart Gold Medal of Achievement. Life Magazine named her one of the nine women of the “100 most important young people in the United States.” She was picked by the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque in 1959 to be the first woman to undergo the same physical and psychological fitness testing regimen as the Mercury Astronaut Selection Tests for America’s first space mission. She passed all three phases with flying colors. Due to her high performance, she was asked to recruit 25 other qualified women pilots. Twelve passed the first series of tests, but the American space program did not open the ranks of its astronaut corps to women until 1978 and the project was shut down. Secretly, however, the women were known as the Mercury 13. Jerrie was later appointed by the Administrator of NASA as consultant to the nation’s space program in 1961, but NASA’s requirement that astronauts have military jet test pilot experience eliminated all women since women were not allowed to fly in the military. After this loss, she decided to serve primitive people in the Amazon. For 35 years, she worked doing this, and has been honored by governments of France, Brazil, Peru, Columbia, and Ecuador. President Nixon awarded her the Harmon Trophy as the top woman pilot in the world. For her humanitarian work in the Amazon, she has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

ABQ Affiliation: Trained at Lovelace

Sources:

Quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/cobb.html

www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mercury/missions/astronaut.html

http://userpages.aug.com/captbarb/astronauts.html

Mrs. D. E. Dalbey

Wife of General Manager of the First Company that Owned the ABQ Airport

Time Period: 1930s

Wife of general manager first company that owned ABQ Airport. She supported People’s Ticket against mayor Clyde Tingley. IN addressing a women’s political meeting in Albuquerque, she reported that Tingley was furious and had threatened to fight the airport and TAT unless she got out of the election campaign. He asked her if she knew that he had done a great deal for the airport and incidentally her husband and TAT and she told him that she had nothing to do with her husband’s business and that TAT only leased a section of the airport’s land for a field. Finally, she related to the audience, after the czar of the city had threatened, cajoled, and attempted to intimidate her in every way possible, he pleaded: “But Mrs. Dalbey, you’re going to vote for me, aren’t you?” The laughter of the women present at the meeting drowned out the speaker’s answer.

ABQ Affiliation: Husband general manager of first company that owned ABQ

Airport.

Sources:

Balloons to Bombers, Don. E. Alberts

Amelia Earhart

Pilot

Time Period: 1920s-1940s

Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas on July 24, 1897. She spent her childhood in various towns, including Atchison and Kansas City, Kansas and Des Moines, Iowa. At 19, she attended Ogontz School near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Two years later, she left school and took a course in Red Cross First Aid. She enlisted as a nurse’s aid at Spadina Military Hospital in Toronto, Canada and tended to wounded soldiers during WWI. The next year, she enrolled as a premedical student at Columbia University in New York. She later moved to California where she learned to fly. In 1922, she purchased her first airplane, a Kinner Airster with the help of her mother and sister. After her parent’s divorce, she moved back east where she was employed as a social worker in Denison House in Boston, Massachusetts. She was selected to be the first female passenger on a transatlantic flight in 1928 by her future husband, the publisher, George Palmer Putnam. With pilot Wilmer Stultz and mechanic Lou Gordon, Earhart flew from Newfoundland to Wales aboard the trimotor plane Friendship. Upon the completion of the flight, Earhart wrote the book 20 Hours – 40 minutes. In 1931, she married George, but continued her aviation career under her maiden name. George organized her flights and public appearances, and arranged for her to endorse a line of flight luggage and sports clothes. He also published two of her books, The Fun of It, and Last Flight. After a series of record-making flights, she became the first woman to make a solo transatlantic flight in 1932. That same year, she developed flying clothes for the Ninety-Nines. Then, she began designing her own line of clothes “for the woman who lives actively.” In 1935, Earhart became the first person to fly from Hawaii to the American mainland. By doing so, she became not only the first person to solo anywhere in the Pacific, but also the first person to solo both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Also in 1935, she joined the faculty of Purdue University as a female career consultant. It was the purchase of a Lockheed Electro, through Purdue University, that enabled Earhart to fulfill her dream of circumnavigating the world. In June 1937, Earhart embarked upon the first around-the-world flight at the equator. On July 2^nd, after completing nearly two-thirds of her flight—over 22,000 miles—Earhart vanished along with her navigator Frederick Noonan. They took off from Lae, New Guinea, bound for tiny Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. The distance from Lae to Howland was about the equal to a transcontinental flight across the US. A great naval, air, and land search failed to locate Earhart, Noonan, or the aircraft, and it was assumed they were lost at sea. To this day, their fate is the subject of unending speculation. In 1939, George authored Earhart’s biography, entitled Soaring Wings, as a tribute to his wife. As a whole, Earhart also tried to combat stereotypes by stressing variety of women involved in aviation. Throughout her life, Earhart believed women needed to step forward together and open doors for one another. She spent much of her career speaking and writing to promote women’s opportunities in aviation and other fields. Other records that Earhart holds are as follows: 1922, Set women’s altitude record of 14,000 feet; 1928, became first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger; 1928, was the first woman to make a solo round-trip flight across the US; 1929, took third place in the first Women’s Air Derby in her Lockheed Vega; 1930, set women’s speed record of 181 miles per hour; 1931, set autogiro altitude record of 18, 451 feet; 1932, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic; 1932, received the National Geographic Society’s Special Gold Medal; 1932, Set women’s transcontinental speed record for Los Angeles, California to Newark, New Jersey; 1933, broke her previous women’s transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to Newark; 1935, became the first person to fly solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City; 1935, became the first person to fly solo from Mexico City to Newark; 1937, broke her previous women’s transcontinental speed record from Oakland, CA to Honolulu, HI.

ABQ Affiliation: Visited ABQ @ certain points. Stopped here at times.

List of Images:

1. PA1968.001.043

T.A.T. Ford Trimotor inaugural flight ceremony

20th Century, 1929
Print, B/W
4.75" x 7"
Locale: Albuquerque Airport

Gift of Clark Speakman

T.A.T. Ford Tri-motor, NC 9646, refueling. T.A.T. terminal building in background, inaugural flight ceremonies at airport, July 1929. Catherine Stinson (Mrs. Mike Otero) made speech. W.A. Keleher was master of ceremonies. Amelia Earhart on this plane.

2. PA1978.141.268

T.A.T., Tri-motor, Clyde Tingley, Amelia Earhart
Hanna

20th century; Depression, 07/14/1929

Clyde Tingley, Amelia Earhart and others IN FRONT OF T.A.T. AIRLINES TRI-MOTOR, INCLUDING MAYOR CLYDE TINGLEY & AMELIA EARHART PUTNAM. The University of New Mexico Centennial Project.

3. PC2012.15.1

Proclamations (2-sided)
Amelia Earhart proclamation signed by Mayor Harry Kinney and Governor Bruce King,

American, 20th century, 1982
paper, ink, silk ribbon

Gift of Ed Dibello

Two documents dry-mounted to cardboard into 1 sheet. One side is an Amelia Earhart Day proclamation by Mayor Harry Kinney, January 28, 1982, and the other is a state proclamation signed by Gov. Bruce King for the week of January 24-30, 1982. Paper, ink, embossed foil, satin ribbon.

This city/state document complements a photograph of Earhart taken in Albuquerque in 1929. There are ongoing efforts to locate her aircraft which could be resolved soon.

4. RS1989.5.1

Painting, Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart
Hella Broeske Shattuck, 1906

20th century; 1970s, 1971
Oil paint
Overall: 24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm)

In Memory of Beryldine Shollenbarger

Oil on canvas painting of Amelia Earhart by Hella Broeske Shattuck, b. 1906, painted 1971. DS 10/09.

Sources:

Ameliaearhartmuseum.org

Laura Ingalls, Jacqueline Cochran, Ruth Nichols

Women Pilots

Time Period: 1930s/1940s

Well-known women pilots in Albuquerque. Ingalls established the women’s east-west transcontinental speed record during the 1930s, landing at the airport after dark en route to LA. She also made a big hit at Oxnard Field in 1941. During a nationwide anti-war publicity flight, she stalled her Locheed Vega aircraft just before touching down on the field’s east-west runway. The resulting crash looked bad, but she was fine. Parts of the plane hung for many years in the shop area of ABQ high. Jackie Cochran set a new world speed record in 1940 at 249 MPH

ABQ Affiliation: ABQ pilots

List of Images:

1. PA1993.001.003

John Fertig