Archives, Data, and Historical Research

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For this blog post, I’d like to follow Alison’s suggestion to think about how the creation and structuring of data relates to our final projects for this course, drawing on themes from our readings, our class discussion, and my work with Tropy for my final project.

An advantage, as I see it, of Tropy is that it allows researchers to organize their images of archival material and to pair images of archival material with metadata that describes the identifying features of the document. This organizing of images and the pairing of images and metadata has been useful for my research, as my current method of storing images of archival material—simply using folders in File Explorer for large groups of images—has made accessing these images and information about the archival material they represent a labor-intensive task. Because I think it would be unwieldy, if not impossible, to add all of the metadata for a document as the image file’s name, I’ve kept this descriptive information as handwritten notes in a research notebook, with the result that my image files are organized in the order in which I took the photographs, and this in turn reflects the order of the documents in individual box folders in the archive. I suppose that I could create File Explorer folders to correspond to archival box folders, but the idea of separating my images in this way and making it even more difficult to navigate from one document in one folder to another in another folder hasn’t appealed to me.

While it has been satisfying to pair my images with documents’ metadata using Tropy, it has involved working with Tropy’s existing templates for structuring item-level metadata. One of Tropy’s three templates is Tropy Correspondence, which includes fields for the document’s recipient as well as its author. In the number of items I have added to Tropy, nine of them are letters that were either composed and typed or typed from notes or dictation by a secretary. Should the secretary be considered the author of these letters? Would the secretary’s potential authorship depend on whether they themselves composed the letter or whether they typed the letter from notes left or dictation given? What of this information could be determined by a researcher removed from the circumstances in which an archival document was created? My approach to these letters has been to indicate that the letter was sent by the secretary in the item’s title, but to note the secretary’s employer as the author of the letter so that I can use the author field to sort items.

I’ve also been thinking about the question that John Markoff posed in relation to the cahiers project of how well an existing corpus of material in an archive or archives reflects or represents the total amount of material written historically. In some instances, the loss of material may be evident—for example, a letter may refer to a telegram received by the letter’s author, but that telegram may not be preserved alongside the letter in an archive. In other instances, researchers may have to work toward identifying documents that have not been preserved and make assumptions based on the information available in surviving documents. While this may prove frustrating for researchers, noting instances of absence and loss may prompt critical reflection on archives as constructed repositories of information and as resources for historical research.

User-Generated Content and Academic Communities

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“The style of moderation can vary from site to site, and from platform to platform, as rules around what UGC is allowed are often set at a site or platform level, and reflect that platform’s brand and reputation, its tolerance for risk, and the type of user engagement it wishes to attract.”

Sarah T. Roberts, “Content Moderation,” in Encyclopedia of Big Data, eds. Laurie A. Schintler and Connie L. McNeely (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 2017), 1.

In reflecting on our readings and our discussion this week, this quote by Sarah T. Roberts stood out to me, and it brought to mind several related thoughts about user-generated content and user interactions by academics and others on online platforms.

Through my personal Facebook account, I am a member of several private groups related to my professional interests, including Friends of the International Congress on Medieval Studies (2,218 members), the International Society for the Study of Medievalism (541 members), and Teaching the Middle Ages (2,765 members). With the exception of the second group, these groups are not officially affiliated with professional organizations, though they do consist of academics and others with interests in these topics. Each group has at least one admin or moderator who is at least nominally responsible for moderating user-generated content and managing the community of members.

As Roberts has noted, the “style of moderation” of sites and platforms, and of groups hosted by platforms, can and does vary, and I am interested here in considering private Facebook groups such as those I mentioned that I am a member of as spaces in which users generate more or less “academic” or “professional” content through their personal social media accounts. These private groups can be, and have been, contentious spaces, with posts, conversations, and, at times, arguments about prejudice and discrimination faced by members of these groups, particularly medievalists of color, having resulted in reminders by the groups’ admins of acceptable behavior within the group and in tensions among members both in these online spaces and in the field more generally.

Considered more broadly, what implications and impacts might the moderation of user-generated content and user interactions on online platforms, particularly social media, have for academic communities?

With pressure to be professionally “visible” and “engaged” in online spaces, including social media platforms, as part of professional networking, gaining field recognition, and improving one’s metrics for the hiring and tenure processes—I am thinking here of our conversations and work earlier this semester with Michael Dietrich—are there ethical concerns in asking or expecting academics to build an online professional presence, particularly in regard to graduate students, early career scholars, and those who are unaffiliated, given that such a presence requires continuous work and that this work is likely to be uncompensated and unacknowledged?

World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito II

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In our assigned readings, our discussions in class, and my work with the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito, I was most interested in relationships of space and place and the ways in which place names might reflect these relationships.

In my previous blog post, I described my search for “London” using the World Historical Gazetteer, which resulted in what might be described as the physical space of London, England, as well as other physical spaces referred to in whole or in part by “London,” such as Little London, a community in Jamaica. I considered how shared place names might reflect various relationships among places, such as imperial or colonial relationships, or instances in which those inhabiting a place might seek to form or emphasize a connection with another place through a shared place name.

Such intentional place naming might have an effect of collapsing spatial and temporal distance, as is the case in the documents I chose for my work with Recogito. A group of four short texts from 1927–1928 from my current research on Washington National Cathedral reveals intentional references to places, eras, and individuals in medieval Europe and in the “Old World” more generally. These references were made by an individual in America in the twentieth century in order to emphasize, if not form, a connection between these medieval places and people and the Episcopal cathedral in the nation’s capital.

The spatial and temporal distance of America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from medieval Europe is a tension that underlies this example and American medievalism more broadly. In what ways is it possible to create “medieval” architecture in a place that is spatially, temporally, and culturally distant from Europe in the Middle Ages? In the documents I chose for my work with Recogito, various materials brought to Washington National Cathedral, the provenance attributions of these materials, and the architectural style of the cathedral were intended to form and emphasize a connection between the place of the cathedral and the place of the “Old World.” In addition to the linguistic naming of a place, it seems to me that we can consider the ways in which an architectural style, as a kind of visual language, can construct and evoke a sense of place. It would be interesting to see what spatial results would be returned for “medieval” and “Gothic” if searched for using Frankenplace, a project of the Platial Analysis Lab that visualizes the geographic associations of Wikipedia entries, which Karl Grossner shared with us during class and which does not seem to be live at the moment, as Grossner noted.

Working with the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito was useful in that these tools encouraged me to continue thinking about the relationships of space and place and how these relationships may be reflected in visualization tools. Aside from visualizing these relationships, however, I’m not sure whether the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito are tools that I would return to for my particular research. While I do think that a visualization tool would be useful, ideally such a tool would allow me to visualize and interact with the spatial and temporal aspects of an object’s provenance, documenting the object’s positions and movements in space and time—perhaps something like Itinera?

World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito

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1. World Historical Gazetteer

For this task, I chose to search for “London,” because I thought that this place name would generate results drawn from several of the World Historical Gazetteer’s datasets and results that refer to physical spaces other than London, England.

“London” generated 90 search results, with the first result, “London (inhabited places) [GB],” referring to what could be described as the physical space of London, England.

This result has four attestations drawn from three datasets (geonames cities (500), Getty TGN (partial), and DK Atlas of World History), and the attestations varyingly classify London as a populated place, inhabited place, city, and settlement—which I thought would be the case, given the temporal span of “London” (or “Londinium”) as a place.

I was also interested in the geographic span of “London,” in the sense that this place name or variations of it might refer to physical spaces other than London, England, given our readings and our discussion of gazetteers as providing data about the past through historical places linked by name and temporal and spatial relationships.

This image (above) shows the geographic span of search results for “London,” with a more opaque circle indicating London, England’s physical space and a dense cluster of circles representing instances of “London” as a place name in the United States and the Caribbean.

I was interested here in the map’s visualization of search results reflecting colonial relationships, as seen in the cluster of results in the northeastern part of the United States and in Little London, a community in Jamaica. The map also visualizes what might be thought of as aspirational relationships, in the sense that America, to some extent, modeled itself as a group of colonies and as a young nation on Britain (and France), which might be reflected in place names.

2. Recogito

For this task, I selected a group of four short texts from 1927–1928 from my current research on Washington National Cathedral. Each of the texts are concerned with establishing a relationship between the cathedral and the “Old World” through various materials brought to the cathedral.

As a tool, Recogito was most useful for me in that annotating texts highlights places and people of interest and visualizes how frequently they are mentioned in the text. With the group of texts I selected, at least, it seems that annotating would require a human user with some familiarity with the text and the people and places to which it refers. In addition to instances in which places and people are named specifically, there are instances in which phrases and terms are used to refer to previously identified locations and individuals: “the devoted monastic brother,” the “Little Garden,” the “Cathedral,” etc. The person creating the annotations would need to be familiar with the people and places mentioned in the text, or at least be able to make educated inferences, in order to annotate such references.

In our readings, our discussion of gazetteers, and our tasks with the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito, I was interested particularly in notions of space and place, in which “space” refers to a coordinate location or spatial situation and “place” refers to a site of human, historical experience. These concepts relate to my research interests and my current work on the use of material to establish connections between “there” and “here” and “past” and “present,” and the subjective use and interpretation of these ways of understanding the world in spatial, or “platial,” and temporal terms.

I’m looking forward to reading other students’ blog posts and to our discussion on Tuesday, in which I would be interested to talk about to what extent the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito as visualization tools enable us, as individual researchers and in our fields, to think about our material in different ways.

“Medievalism”

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After the difficulty I had with the Web of Science for the Citation Analysis Exercise, I was pleased that the first topic of interest I chose for the Network Analysis Exercise, “medievalism,” generated 482 results from the Web of Science. For this blog post, I will discuss two of the networks I created in VOSviewer using data generated by the Web of Science.

Network 1

This network is based on text data from the journal articles’ title and abstract fields using binary counting, which only counts whether a term is present or absent in a given document.

The map that visualizes this network shows that the term “middle age” has the highest occurrence among the seventy-seven terms with a minimum occurrence of ten; “middle age” has an occurrence of ninety-six. For comparison, the terms with the lowest occurrence are “remembrance,” “medieval memory,” “person,” and “medieval period,” each of which occur the minimum of ten. Interestingly, “remembrance” and “medieval memory” were the two terms with the highest relevance, at 7.83. The term with the lowest relevance was “present,” at 0.06. It also seems worth noting that while “new medievalism,” “neo medievalism,” and “nineteenth century medievalism” were included among the forty-six out of seventy-seven terms selected by VOSviewer based on relevance, the term “medievalism” was not.

I am interested in how VOSviewer uses the data generated by the Web of Science to determine which terms are grouped, or “clustered,” together using color in the network visualization. For example, “Britain” and “Germany” are grouped together using yellow, along with “great war,” “war,” and “fantasy,” but “England” and “modern England” are in the group designated by the color blue. To return to my observation on the term “medievalism” not being selected as a relevant term, I am also interested in what relationship may exist between a term’s occurrence and its relevance.

Network 2

This network is based on text data from the journal articles’ title and abstract fields using full counting, which counts all of the occurrences of a term in a given document.

For this network, I used the same parameters as the first network—text data from the journal articles’ title and abstract fields, selection of terms with a minimum occurrence of ten, and selection of the forty-six most relevant terms—except that, instead of using binary counting, I used full counting. The map of this second network resembles the map of the first network somewhat, though this network’s visualization uses six colors rather than four to group terms together, with the addition of purple and a second shade of blue. The terms included in the first and second networks, created using binary and full counting, respectively, also varied.

Terms included in both networks (or, terms counted by both binary and full counting) (26/46 terms):

analysis
author
Britain
debate
development
England
fantasy
Germany
great war
knowledge
medieval memory
modern England
narrative
neo medievalism
new medievalism
nineteenth century medievalism
novel
order
period
person
power
relation
remembrance
rhetoric
state
war

Terms included in only the first network (binary counting) (20/46 terms):

art
concept
context
essay
example
form
influence
medieval period
memory
middle age
modernity
past
present
relationship
return
role
text
tradition
use
way

Terms included in only the second network (full counting) (20/46 terms):

approach
country
field
hand
indigenous knowledge
interest
Joan
language
Morris
nature
nostalgia
place
play
research
romanticism
self
Shakespeare
sovereignty
Spain
violence

What can you learn from the bibliometric network you have created?

The bibliometric networks I created and the visualization of these networks using VOSviewer reveals prevalent terms and the connections, or “links,” among these terms in journal articles that address various aspects and instances of medievalism. While I have concerns about the data provided by the Web of Science, which I addressed in my last blog post and will refer to again later in this post, I found the visualization of this data to be useful in thinking about the ways in which these terms are related and how these terms have been used in scholarship.

How does your choice of data limit your analysis?

My VOSviewer bibliometric networks were created using the most prevalent terms in the titles and abstracts of journal articles included in the Web of Science’s Basic Search results for “medievalism,” with the range of the articles’ publication dates determined by Pitt’s subscription. As I mentioned in my last blog post, the restriction of the Web of Science’s searchable publications to academic journals of interest does not account for other publication formats, such as books, essays in edited volumes, and exhibition catalogues, or for material published prior to 1945, which is the earliest year included in Pitt’s Web of Science subscription. Using the Web of Science’s data reproduces its limits in VOSviewer network visualizations.

How can you structure your data to change your analysis?

The first and second bibliometric networks I created show how the structure of data and the way data are counted can change an analysis. By first creating a map based on text data using binary counting and then creating a map based on the same text data using full counting, I saw differences in the terms included in the networks, the relationships among terms, and the ways in which terms were grouped. I could also have changed my analysis by increasing or decreasing the minimum number of occurrences per term, or by changing my selections in other aspects of the map creation process.

What models of the academic world do these metrics produce?

The choice and structure of data based on the interests of those developing searchable resources, datasets, and visualizations or other forms of data presentation call into question, for me, at least, the extent to which such metrics should be valued, in general and in hiring, evaluation, and tenure processes in the academic world, especially when such metrics are used uncritically across fields of study, as we have discussed in class. I am having difficulty articulating my thoughts in response to this question, so I will be interested in hearing from others as we continue our discussion in class.

J. L. Schrader, “George Grey Barnard: The Cloisters and The Abbaye”

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Schrader, J. L. “George Grey Barnard: The Cloisters and The Abbaye.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 37, no. 1 (Summer 1979): 3–52.

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Cited Reference Search

Total number of citations: 3

Borland, Jennifer and Martha Easton. “Integrated Pasts: Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle.” Gesta 57, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 95–118.

Chong, Alan. “The Gothic Experience: Re-creating History in American Museums.” Journal of the History of Collections 27, no. 3 (2015): 481–491.

Maxwell, Robert. “Accounting for Taste: American Collectors and Twelfth-Century French Sculpture.” Journal of the History of Collections 27, no. 3 (2015): 389–400.

What can you learn about the number of citations to this article per year since it was published?

The number of citations to this article seems restricted to citations in articles, rather than including citations to this article in books, essays in edited volumes, and other formats, such as exhibition catalogues. For example, the article I selected for this exercise is cited in Elizabeth Bradford Smith, “George Grey Barnard: Artist/Collector/Dealer/Curator,” Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting 1800–1940 (University Park: Palmer Museum of Art, 1996): 133–142, which is an essay in an exhibition catalogue from 1996, seventeen years after the Schrader article was published, but the Smith essay did not appear as having a citation to the Schrader article in my cited reference search. The restriction of publication formats considered would seem to limit the usefulness of such a search for my field of study, which is the history of art and architecture.

The cited reference index provided three search results, each to the same article by Schrader, with slightly different information for the cited author, issue, and page of the article, and each of the three results led to a different citing article. Two of the citing articles were published in 2015 in the same special issue of the Journal of the History of Collections, and the third citing article was published in 2018. That Schrader’s article from 1979 is cited in these three recent articles indicates that Schrader’s work is still of interest to scholars writing on similar material, or at least that Schrader’s work is referred to in discussions of the state of the literature.

What can you learn about who cites this article? What are their disciplinary identifications?

The four authors who cite Schrader’s article are art historians, medievalists, and museum professionals with interests in medievalism, the history of collections, and antiquarianism.

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Basic Search

I had difficulty with the basic search. The author of the journal article I selected, J. L. Schrader, did not appear in the Basic Search results of any variation of “J. L. Schrader” that I tried. I did, however, find three articles by J. L. Schrader using the Author Search, though the articles were included in the algorithmically generated author record of Jordyn Lee Schrader, who is apparently affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Delaware. The information below is gathered from the results of my Author Search.

Total number of publications: 3

Schrader, J. L. “A Medieval Bestiary.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin New Series 44, no. 1, A Medieval Bestiary (Summer 1986): 1, 12–55.

Schrader, J. L. “George Grey Barnard: The Cloisters and The Abbaye.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 37, no. 1 (Summer 1979): 3–52.

Schrader, J. L. “Antique and Early Christian Sources for the Riha and Stuma Patens.” Gesta 18, no. 1, Papers Related to Objects in the Exhibition “Age of Spirituality,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art (November 1977–February 1978) (1979): 147–156.

What is the H-index?

N/A: an H-index was not provided for the J. L. Schrader for whom I was searching.

What are the average citations per item?

0.33

Which of these numbers would you prefer to have used in evaluations for hiring and tenure? Why?

For the reasons discussed previously regarding the limited usefulness of these searches for my field of study, I think that using these numbers in evaluations for hiring and tenure would be misleading, at least in the case of the article I chose for this exercise. J. L. Schrader was a curator at The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s branch museum of medieval art, and would have written or contributed to various exhibition catalogues and essays on the museum’s permanent collection, none of which were included in the search results, which seems to be due to the restriction of searchable publications to articles.

Is this kind of analysis appropriate for all academic fields? Why or why not?

The restriction of the Web of Science’s searchable publications to articles is a considerable shortcoming, in my view, that would prevent me from searching with confidence. In addition, in the Cited Reference Search, users are not able to click on the name of the cited author to view their authored articles, which I assume is in part why we were asked to perform a search for the author of our chosen article using the Web of Science’s Basic Search. For example, JSTOR has a feature that allows users to easily view all of the search results authored by and related to a given author by clicking on the author’s name, which generated six results for J. L. Schrader. Given my criticisms of the Web of Science for my field based on my searches, I don’t see myself returning to the Web of Science as a research tool.

Gender and Museum Professions

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For this exercise, I was interested in data regarding gender and museum professions, and more specifically data that provide information on the percentage and professional distribution of women employed by art museums. I was hoping to find cross-national sources of data on the gender composition of art museum employees, but much of what I came across were academic sources in the form of articles and essays and data on gender inequality in cultural institutions considered more broadly. Though I did not come across cross-national information on women employed by art museums, I found two reports on gender in American art museums: one by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka S+R, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), published January 28, 2019, and the other by AAMD and the National Center for Arts Research (NCAR), published in 2017. I thought it might also be useful to consider the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Women in Public Service Project and its Global Women’s Leadership Initiative Index (GWLII), and their indicators in thinking about the social, economic, and political factors that may affect the gender composition of art museum employees and the professional roles likely to be held by women in art museums.

The first report, “Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018,” details the results of surveys that were sent to directors of AAMD and AAM member art museums in 2014 and 2018. The report is most concerned with what its authors refer to as “intellectual leadership positions,” which they identify with positions in museum leadership, education, curatorial, and conservation, as potential career pathways to directorship positions. (The involvement of the AAMD (Association of Art Museum Directors) in developing these surveys might be a possible reason for the report’s focus on “intellectual leadership positions,” considered to be pathways to directorships.) Women in roles or departments such as visitor services and front of house staff, membership, development, marketing, administration, registrars, and preparators were not reflected in the report in a disaggregated way, and it is not clear whether women in these positions were included in the report’s percentage of women employed by art museums. The results of the 2014 and 2018 surveys as presented in the 2019 report indicate that American art museums are and have continued to be staffed primarily by women, though men are still more likely to hold senior positions in museum leadership.

The second report, “The Ongoing Gender Gap in Art Museum Directorships,” presents various factors that affect gender representation in American art museum directorships that were identified in the results of surveys conducted in 2013 and 2016. (As noted in my introduction, the AAMD was involved in developing these surveys.) The authors of this report have identified varying relationships among the gender gap in museum directorships, salary disparities, operating budget size, and the type of art museum, providing information on the factors affecting gender disparity in art museums at the most senior position in museum leadership.

These two reports are specific to gender representation in American art museums, but the limited scope of each report does not provide a comprehensive understanding of the gender composition of art museum employees beyond those in “intellectual leadership positions,” including directorships. For gathering data relating to art museums in America and in other nations, I thought it might be useful to consider the SDGs, the GWLII, and their indicators in thinking about what structural factors and socioeconomic situations may contribute to gender representation in art museums.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 is to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. An indicator related to the social norms and attitudes that may prevent women and girls from seeking paid work and education is the proportion of their time spent on unpaid care and domestic work (SDG indicator 5.4.1). Related SDGs here include SDG 8, which focuses on decent work and economic growth, and SDG 4, meant to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education. SDG 8 indicators that seek in part to measure the average hourly earnings of employed women and men (8.5.1) as well as their respective unemployment rates (8.5.2) may provide socioeconomic context for the number of women employed by art museums and for salary disparities among men and women in comparable professional positions. SDG 4 indicators meant to reflect gender disparities in education and access to education, such as 4.5.1, may be considered similarly.

The Global Women’s Leadership Initiative Index of the Women in Public Service Project is concerned with women’s leadership in public service and has identified three “pillars” of parity: pathways, positions, and power. Though the various professional positions that may be held by women in art museums may not necessarily include a formal leadership component, one could draw from the GWLII, along with the SDG indicators mentioned previously, in considering the availability of access women have to education and museum professions and the representation of women employed by art museums.

Sources:

“Global Women’s Leadership Initiative Index Methodology.” The Women in Public Service Project. 2018. http://data.50x50movement.org/index/methodology.

“Roadmap to 50×50: Power and Parity in Women’s Leadership.” Wilson Center. May 2018. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/roadmap_to_50x50-_power_and_parity_in_womens_leadership.pdf.

“Sustainable Development Goal 4: Ensure Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Promote Lifelong Learning.” United Nations. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg4.

“Sustainable Development Goal 5: Achieve Gender Equality and Empower All Women and Girls.” United Nations. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg5.

“Sustainable Development Goal 8: Promote Sustained, Inclusive and Sustainable Economic Growth, Full and Productive Employment and Decent Work for All.” United Nations. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg8.

Treviño, Veronica, Zannie Giraud Voss, Christine Anagnos, and Alison D. Wade. “The Ongoing Gender Gap in Art Museum Directorships.” Association of Art Museum Directors. 2017. https://aamd.org/sites/default/files/document/AAMD%20NCAR%20Gender%20Gap%202017.pdf.

Westermann, Mariët, Roger Schonfeld, and Liam Sweeney. “Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018.” The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. January 28, 2019. https://mellon.org/media/filer_public/e5/a3/e5a373f3-697e-41e3-8f17-051587468755/sr-mellon-report-art-museum-staff-demographic-survey-01282019.pdf.

Biases and Motivations

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In our readings and conversations over the past week, I was most familiar with the notion that ideological biases inform the way that information is presented. As I mentioned at the close of my blog post for last week, I have been thinking about the presentation of information, informed by individual, social, and cultural biases, as knowledge in scholarly narratives of the history of art. As a brief (counter) example, in his essay “Race, Nationality and Art” (1936), the art historian Meyer Schapiro argues against the art historical notion that national and racial groups have fixed psychological qualities that are evident stylistically in works of art produced by members of these groups.

I was most unfamiliar with the concept of statistical indicators as discussed in our readings and in our class meeting with Melanie Hughes, and I was glad that we were able to talk with Hughes about her ongoing SDG indicator work.

I was most intrigued by the discussion of economic growth in Fulvia Mecatti, Franca Crippa, and Patrizia Farina’s article “A Special Gen(d)re of Statistics: Roots, Development and Methodological Prospects of Gender Statistics.” In their discussion, the authors include a quote by Saadia Zahidi from the World Economic Forum in 2010 that frames the education, empowerment, and integration of women and girls in terms of a necessity in order for economic recovery and growth (457–458). In reading this section of their article, I became concerned with the motivations that may be behind gender equity that prioritize economic growth. In their conclusion, Mecatti, Crippa, and Farina argue that eliminating gender-based inequality is in the interest of society as a whole because society would benefit from the resulting social development and economic growth. While the authors’ statements here may be read as, and may have been intended as, a persuasive argument meant to raise interest in eliminating gender-based inequality, I still question instances in which social justice is seemingly made palatable to those not directly affected by the issue in question—that is, I feel that the fact that education, empowerment, and integration are and would be beneficial for women and girls should be reason enough for others to support initiatives that would bring those goals within reach.

Overview Analysis and Reflections

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In the readings for our first two overview weeks, I was most interested in the ways in which power and privilege both have structured and are evident in systems of classification and in representation and misrepresentation. For my response, I will consider the discussion of these themes in our readings by Safiya Umoja Noble and Roopika Risam.

In Safiya Umoja Noble’s chapter, “The Future of Knowledge in the Public,” Noble discusses how the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) have reflected and reinforced the history of characterizing certain individuals as “problem people” based on aspects of their identity or their position within a group (2). In addition to reflecting the attitudes of those involved in developing such systems of classification, information systems such as the LCSH and the Internet continue to shape how certain individuals and groups are characterized and perceived in the present by authoritatively identifying them and locating related material under subject headings and search results that participate in “‘legitimizing the ideology of dominant groups’ to the detriment of people of color” (2). Noble’s discussion of the movement led by students at Dartmouth College and supported by campus librarians and the American Libraries Association to have the Library of Congress replace the term “illegal aliens” with terms preferred by undocumented immigrants and their advocates provides an example of the importance of self-representation and the adoption of preferred terms in consultation with the individuals and groups to whom those terms and classifications refer, particularly in systems that have been structured by power and privilege. Near the end of the chapter, Noble notes a commitment to “ensure that traditionally underrepresented ideas and perspectives are included in the shaping of the field—to surface counternarratives,” which Roopika Risam emphasizes as being central to the development of a postcolonial digital humanities (14)

In Roopika Risam’s essay, “Decolonizing the Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice,” Risam characterizes a postcolonial digital humanities as one that centers intersectional engagement with various “axes of identity” that shape the production of knowledge, in contrast to colonial and neo-colonial information institutions and systems that situate the colonizer at the center and privilege certain Western perspectives and forms of knowledge (78). Risam describes postcolonial approaches to digital humanities as those that center and affirm local and indigenous forms of knowledge and knowledge production while questioning and seeking to dismantle the imposition of colonial and neo-colonial perspectives. For me, Risam’s essay recalls Safiya Umoja Noble’s discussion of the LCSH and the student-led and librarian-supported movement to involve, if not center, those to whom the subject headings refer in replacing existing terminology with preferred terms.

The readings for our first two overview weeks, represented here by Noble’s chapter and Risam’s essay, encouraged me to think critically about the ways in which information institutions and systems construct and present information and the accumulation of that information as knowledge. I am thinking here of two of my courses from last semester, Cultural Identities in Medieval Europe and History and Ethics of Collecting and Collections, in which we discussed how individual, social, and cultural biases have informed Western scholarly narratives of the history of art, including representations and misrepresentations of the individuals, societies, and cultures involved in the production of works of art and other cultural objects.

Sarah’s Intro

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I am a first-year doctoral student in the History of Art and Architecture department. My primary fields of study are medieval art and architecture, medievalism, and the history of collections. In my current research, I am interested in George Grey Barnard (1863–1938), who was an American sculptor and collector of medieval art. In considering Barnard and his relationships with various institutions to which he hoped to sell objects from his collections, I am interested also in the broader historical and scholarly contexts of American medievalism, public perceptions of medieval art and notions of the medieval past, and the relationship between medieval and modern.

I enrolled in this seminar in part because I feel I have limited experience with digital methods. My experience has primarily consisted of using digital libraries and databases in the course of research, though I have also worked with collection databases as well as fundraising, donor, and member management software in museum settings. My goals for this seminar include learning and thinking critically about methods of producing, storing, and accessing information and knowledge, including but not limited to digital searches, databases, citations, and mapping. Much of my current research is based on archival material (correspondence, magazines, photographs, etc.), so I would be particularly interested in methods of managing the information I have gathered related to this material, such as my notes regarding a given document’s location in its archive and photographs I have taken or scans I have made of letters, press clippings, etc.