jgieseki

Dana Hopkins ’14 is majoring in art history and visual arts. Professor Crystal Hall recently spoke with her about her experience of taking the Gateway for Digital Humanities course.

Why are you taking the Gateway course?

I have great respect for Professor Fletcher and knew that I liked her teaching style from experience in previous courses with her, and I had heard wonderful things about Professor Chown through some friends who did Robocup under his guidance. Beyond that, the subject matter of digital humanities itself and the professional opportunities it presents are very appealing to me. I love discovering how seemingly opposite disciplines may intersect to create surprising and intriguing results. I love how the confrontations between fields leads to innovation, how it requires problem solving and creativity. I love trying on another perspective for size and attempting to read the world through computational thinking rather than what I’ve previously been exposed to.

I also wanted to take a class that was outside of my norm. For the past two years I’ve almost exclusively taken visual arts and art history classes in order to complete my major requirements. It’s nice to have a class where I feel that I can bring something very useful to the table (in this case a very visually-based and subjective view on the world) to something that is outside of my major. I also felt like it would start me on my way to obtaining a skill set that will become increasingly useful in our media-driven modern world and help me be more marketable as I prepare to leave Bowdoin in the spring.

What has surprised you in the seminar so far?

The mix of students in the class is really neat to me. We seem to come from all different kinds of backgrounds (visual arts, art history, comp sci, English, biology, mathematics) and from all different class years. This leads to the conversations in class going places that I would never expect them to, and I really enjoy that.

It’s also surprised me how much I like programming. I’m not particularly good at it yet, but starting to understand what kind of work goes into all the technology that I so easily take for granted has been very eye-opening and humbling for me.

Do you have any early ideas about your final project?

I am thinking about making a deep map of Bowdoin, probably primarily based on architectural changes throughout the College’s history, but also linking it to testimonials from current students and historical primary sources regarding famous alums such as Longfellow and Hawthorne. I would like to make it an app, if possible, and link it to GPS coordinate-tracking systems so that prospective students (and current students and alums alike) could access it and experience the history of Bowdoin as they walk around campus. Not only would this be a nice way for people to become more connected to the College, but it would also be an opportunity for me to dig deeply into Bowdoin’s Special Collections and thereby better appreciate the treasure-trove that is housed there.

I have arrived at Bowdoin College as the New Media and Data Visualization Specialist, Postdoctoral Fellow in the new Digital and Computational Studies Initiative (DCSI). After saying goodbye to Brooklyn, I am delighted and excited to be here!

I have always been enamored with all things tech since my days on the Chesapeake BBS and installing my high school’s first network, but present technologies thrill me in new ways. Digital collaborations afford more collaborative and participatory approaches to research than ever before imagined. Employing digital and computational studies in our research also produces more robust tools, theories, methods, and analytics. Wired milieus prompt the crossing of many disciplinary boundaries, and they also reaffirm our dedications to our chosen fields.

So, you wonder, whatever does this have to do with Bowdoin? Bowdoin’s new Digital and Computational Studies Initiative (DCSI) is asking tough and important questions of how to bring to light and life both digital and computational studies from an interdisciplinary perspective in a liberal arts environment. How can digital and computational studies workshops extend and support the research of a top faculty body? How can such work inspire and better ready our student leaders here at Bowdoin in a world so rapidly changing and shifting in its technologies? We are going to find out. I have the pleasure and honor of helping to shape this program and its vision. I work with our co-chairs Eric Chown (DCSI and Computer Science) and Pamela Fletcher (DCSI and Art History), my future co-instructor Eric Gaze (Center for Quantitative Reasoning), and my co-postdoctoral fellow Crystal Hall (DCSI), as well as a team of faculty from across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

But how does this involve my own work on the co-production of gender, sexuality, and space? And how did I get involved? In recent months I have been posting about a series of data visualizations I have been producing as part of my study of lesbian-queer spaces, economies, and culture in NYC, 1983-2008. Half of my research on the topic involved qualitative endeavors of interviews, mental mapping, and artifact sharing, while the remainder of my work was focused on the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The incredibly large amount of data I gathered on the 381 organizational records of NYC-based lesbian-queer organizations spanning 25 years quickly prompted forms of quantitative analysis that could make sense of over 2,000 data points. A graphic representation to this can be seen to the left.

While some may question my use of quantitative analyses to piece together lesbian-queer histories in that non-qualitative methods erase voice and experience, I have unearthed no better method for bringing together the stories of such an invisibilized, anonymized, and disregarded group. The oppressed can and must record their stories one by one, and each story matters. At the same time, we must also embrace these new ways of connecting to imagine and enact our history in new ways. The social sciences are radically shifting who they can account for and how they represent their populations as well. What would see and hear by turning to large data sets of our history available? What if we could weave together the remnants of histories of not only the dozens but the tens of thousands? This is the goal of my work today and in the upcoming years.

My interests and skills will be put to use as part of the DCSI team at  Bowdoin to ask similar, tough questions and produce exciting and complicated answers. Drawing upon my background in geography, psychology, sociology, anthropology, architecture, and design, I am contributing towards the way new media and data visualization will play a roll in the research and learning of the Bowdoin community. I couldn’t be more thrilled every morning as I head to work scheming about my work with the faculty here and my future teaching, plotting research projects to launch with brilliant students, and how my own research will grow and play a roll in this truly awe-inspiring liberal arts institution.

 

This post was edited and reblogged from Jen Jack Gieseking’s personal blog, jgieseking.org.