Digital and Computational Studies Blog

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.

This semester marked the first offering of a “Gateway” course in the Digital and Computational Studies Initiative, INTD 2041: Gateway to the Digital Humanities. As a new faculty member at Bowdoin, the title of the course gave me pause: what is a gateway and how does it differ from other points of entry? Also, the course is my own professional gateway to Bowdoin and to exploring a new area of my research in digital humanities. Since Pamela Fletcher (co-director of DCSI), Jack Gieseking (New Media and Data Visualization Specialist), and I have offices in the Visual Arts Center, I immediately thought that the Class of 1875 columns (top right) would be an appropriate image for this first blog post about arriving at Bowdoin, but I have since learned that Bowdoin has no fewer than 3 other sets of gates on campus, and so my image  (left) needed to be a collage (something for which the Gateway students will be learning to write code later this semester).

My doctoral training in Italian literature immediately suggested Dante’s famous gates to the Inferno as an archetypal model for this kind of opening:

Per me si va ne la città dolente, per me si va ne l’etterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente.Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore: fecemi la divina podestate, la somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore. Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. – Inferno III.1-9, ed. Durling & Martinez, 1996

Through me the way is to the city dolent; Through me the way is to eternal dole; Through me the way among the people lost.Justice incited my sublime Creator; Created me divine Omnipotence, The highest Wisdom and the primal Love. Before me there were no created things, Only eterne, and I eternal last. All hope abandon, ye who enter in! – translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Class of 1825

My early experiences at Bowdoin certainly have nothing in common with the city of woe, eternal pain, or residing among the lost that Dante’s Gates of Hell announce! (Given the troublesome relationship many of us have with computers, I do feel obliged to acknowledge a final project in my 2009 Dante seminar in which a student revised Hell for a digital world so that a judging figure of Bill Gates evaluated the technical skill of all newly arrived souls and sent the digital sinners to various eternal tech support lines.) In spite of metaphorical limitations, I do think Dante’s structure can serve as a useful means for understanding the multiple gateways present: for me, this seminar is a point of entry to academic life at Bowdoin; for DCSI this is an opportunity to explore curriculum possibilities; for many of the students this is their first exposure to a new discipline.

In Canto III of the Inferno, the gate itself is doing many things. It is not a passive threshold, but rather, it acts. It speaks to the pilgrim, it touches the emotional quick of the soul, and it verbally maps the entire structure of Dante’s vision of the afterlife.  This is not a window that allows a protected glimpse of content or external possibility. This gateway is part of the architecture of the imagined space of the afterlife and a fundamental structure in the poem: it immediately enunciates and performs the trinity with the repetition of “per me” and its triple terzina length; Justice, the emotional motivator of Dante’s poem is given the emphatic position of first word in the middle terzina; and the guiding principles of the organization of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise are the triplet of power, wisdom, and love. The final tercet tells the fascinating autobiography of the Gates of Hell. This Gateway was not necessary until a dramatic shift in creation (here, Original Sin) established the categories of immortal and mortal. The gate tells new arrivals to abandon all hope, but careful readers know that this admonition does not apply to Dante, and should not apply to them if they follow Dante’s lead by observing, questioning, and applying what they have learned to their own lives.

So, how is INTD 2041 a gateway? Hopefully the language of my poetic analysis will have already hinted at the powerful ways that the “Gateway to Digital Humanities” course is prompting action in the classroom.  Where Dante’s gate acts out the trinity, Gateway to DH students are asked to act out the practices of humanists. My sense is that the motivation for taking the course comes from a potent blend of curiosity and the sense that the material can be immediately applied to life and work outside the classroom. The discussions and activities are organized by categories of materials that humanities disciplines investigate: images, spaces, texts, and networks.  The course itself is necessary because of the unfolding changes that the digital world is bringing to higher education and society at large.

In a way that I feel is indicative of the broader field of digital and computational studies, this seminar on digital humanities obliges participants to be rigorous intellectuals who are also creators. I am delighted to have learned recently that there is already a precedent for the Bowdoin community and Dante’s famous gates, a 2009 exhibit on Auguste Rodin in which preparatory pieces for his sculpture “Gates of Hell” featured prominently.  I look forward to seeing what we are able to create this year as the DCSI begins.

 

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.