This panel showcases three historians pursuing public, digital history as part of the University of Toronto’s Critical Digital Humanities Initiative. How are digital historians pursuing public humanities projects that reach broader publics? These three digital history projects are working within an alternative genealogy of digital humanities sketched by Tara McPherson, a history that might be traced to Charles and Ray Eames rather than Father Busa and IBM. Rather than emphasizing text and processing, these public-oriented DH projects align digitality with visuality, emphasizing aesthetics and design. The three papers sketch out various approaches to the creation and communication of public history projects in the digital age. Collectively, they engage with challenges facing digital historians relating to digital preservation, research creation, audience engagement, and the pitfalls of corporately-owned social media platforms.

Session Chair: Prof. Elspeth Brown, University of Toronto

Paper #1: “An Essential Tension between Presentation and Preservation: The Case of Visualizing the Americas,” Kevin Coleman, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto Mississauga

Digital humanities projects are often pulled in two different directions. The scholar has an interest in presenting research in the most attractive way to garner a larger audience, while the librarian must ensure that the project remains accessible in perpetuity. This tension between the researcher’s emphasis on presentation and the librarian’s on preservation is essential. This paper describes how the competing interests between presentation and preservation were negotiated in the Visualizing the Americas project at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).

Visualizing the Americas examines the history of capitalism through the production and consumption of a single commodity, the banana. The project also preserves rare, endangered records that are integral to the histories of the multinational banana companies and the Latin American and Caribbean communities in which they operated. This project digitizes these archives and makes them freely accessible to anyone in the world. This history and the archives through which we know it enable us to better understand corporate techniques of dividing labor forces along lines of race and ethnicity, of enclosing land that was previously held in common, and of converting biodiverse tropical forests into plantations with genetically identical banana plants.

I will argue that the tension in digital humanities projects between presentation and preservation does not result primarily from miscommunication or personality conflicts or administrative divisions between faculty and librarians. Rather, this tension arises from rapidly changing aesthetic preferences and technologies. Hence solutions to it must be negotiated between scholars, librarians, and designers. I will describe how the Visualizing the Americas project came into being through a collaboration between myself as PI and the UTM librarians. I hired Underline, an award-winning Toronto-based studio to design the website and the UTM Library had a contract with Adam Matthew Digital to host our archival collections. In the end, the Principal Investigator and the designers had to give up beautiful features of the original proposal and the Librarians and Adam Matthew Digital had to develop new parts of the platform to handle our newly negotiated design. This negotiation slowed the project down and made it less pleasing to the eye, but it hopefully guarantees that Visualizing the Americas—its radical content and its counterarchives—will be available to students and researchers around the world for decades to come.

Paper #2: “Instascholar: Effective Research Engagement Strategies for Big Social Media Audiences,” Dr. L.K. Bertram, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto, St. George campus.

How do we make accurate data go viral? This presentation offers insights and advice gleaned from running a large-scale, anonymous open classroom on Instagram (13.5 million views). It describes five of some of the most important data packaging strategies that researchers must consider for generating higher public engagement with their work. Responding to widespread concerns among BIPOC, women, and queer scholars, it also discusses safety and equity approaches that are essential to surviving the power imbalances embedded in these privately-owned and deeply biased platforms.

While some within academic communities simply attribute the disinformation crisis to social media platforms as a whole, the World Health Organization reminds us that the infodemic has only been made possible by a corresponding vacuum of quality, public-facing data online. Building from the interdisciplinary work of scholars like Joy Buolamwini, Ruha Benjamin, Cathy O’Neil, Serge Noiret, and Timnit Gebru, this presentation discusses opportunities for building better data pipelines out of universities on the scale required to address some of the most pressing challenges of the digital age.

Paper #3: “Research Creation and Queer Oral History,” Dr. Elspeth Brown, Professor of History, University of Toronto, Mississauga.

On September 15, 2000, five Toronto police raided the Pussy Palace, an exclusive sex party and bathhouse event for 350 queer women and trans people. The police charged two organizers with violating liquor laws, resulting in a public trial. There has never been an oral history project about this event, the last police raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian history. The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, in collaboration with The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, has collected 36 interviews with bathhouse patrons, event organizers, and community activists. The research enables us to historicize this event within the longer history of Toronto police hostility towards non-normative sexuality, exemplified by the gay male-focused bathhouse raids of 1975-1984 (Warner, 2002; Kinsman and Gentile, 2010; Hooper, 2016).

We have completed our collection and preservation work for this project, having collected the interviews, written the metadata, created transcripts and captions, and donated the materials to The ArQuives, all in collaboration with our narrators.

We are currently working to animate and activate these interviews through research creation in the form of audio portraits, video shorts (via You Tube and Tik Tok), Instagram stories, a digital exhibition, and a series of public events. This paper will reflect on our work in research creation to address the lack of user engagement with digitized, full length oral histories. First, I will outline a critique of digitization, on its own, as an approach in engaging with audiences in relationship to oral history practice. Second, I will offer research creation as a partial strategy in connecting with queer public history audiences. Research creation, as now defined by SSHRC, is “an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation.” My presentation will showcase some of our strategies, situating them in the DH literature relating to oral history and public history praxis.

Comments: Audience.

Participants:

Kevin Coleman's research examines the intersection between capitalism and photography, primarily in Latin America. He is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden (2016), a number of book chapters and journal articles, as well as the Principal Investigator of Visualizing the Americas, a major digital humanities project. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the United States Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship. With support from a SSHRC grant, he led three major collaborative inquiries into the relations between capitalism and photography: Capitalism and the Camera (2021), Photography and Culture (2020), and Radical History Review (2018). He has recently completed a documentary film, The Photos We Don’t Get to See, that attempts to make visible how physical violence gets repeated at the level of the archive.

L.K. Bertram is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto specializing in the delivery of critical historical data through social media algorithms and the history of migration, gender, sexuality, and colonialism in the 19th century North American West. She is the author of The Viking Immigrants: Icelandic North Americans (Winner CHA Clio Prize/ UTP 2020) and is currently finishing a book on the financial lives of sex workers in the 19th century West. Bertram's newest work focuses on how scholars can more effectively combat digital disinformation campaigns. As the anonymous curator of a large-scale public history campaign that hit 9 million views, she focuses on high-yield data packaging strategies for larger scale publics using video-based algorithms (TikTok and Instagram). This new SSHRC-funded project asks: “how do we make good data go viral in the disinformation age?”

Elspeth Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a multi-year digital history and oral history public, digital humanities collaboration. At the University of Toronto, she is also to Faculty Lead for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, a three-year Institutional Strategic Initiative. She is the author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University, 2019); co-editor of “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014); and Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014), among other books. Recent articles include “Trans Oral History as Trans Care” (with Myrl Beam) and “Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ+ Community Archive” (Archivaria 2020). She has published in GLQ, TSQ; Gender and History; American Quarterly; Radical History Review; Photography and Culture; Feminist Studies; Aperture; No More Potlucks, and others).

Data translation processes like visualization and sonification can be used to “tell stories with data” (Lenzi & Gleria 2018, p. 89), providing researchers with innovative approaches to analyze research data and communicate findings to broad audiences (Sawe et al 2020). Sonification has recently gained popularity as an alternative to the more established process of data visualization because of how it can enable an immersive experience of multidimensional and large datasets (Cooke et al 2017). As an emerging method for analyzing and communicating data, sonification presents new and exciting opportunities for researchers to engage critically and creatively with data. However, like data visualization, sonification can also obscure the politics and normative cultural assumptions about the relationship between quantitative data and objectivity if it is wielded as a neutral approach to translating data into information.

Our contribution harnesses these tensions by putting forward preliminary considerations for sonification as a critical experimental method for communication and media studies. We examine how sonification as a method can create an analytic space to draw out the unspoken relations that structure the imagined objectivity of data-driven approaches to research (Campt 2015; Benjamin 2019).

Sound is widely recognized as an efficient yet complex means of communicating meaning and emotion through time, space, and frequencies, giving listeners a distinct and subjective perspective of data that may otherwise be inaccessible. Some musicologists who work with data sonification fixate on the idea of accurate representation (i.e. mapping sounds that represent the data as closely as possible). For example, the sound of a ticking clock might represent the passage of time through a particular data set. But these kinds of sounds are often culturally determined. Instead, our presentation examines how sonification can tune us into silences, omissions and intensities when employed as a counterintuition.

In our exploration of data sonification as a method, we integrate examples of how we have applied it as a method in research, teaching and learning. Sonification, as we argue, is an exploratory and explanatory method to activate different “modalities of perception, encounter and engagement” (Campt 2015 p.4). We turn to queer and post-colonial sound studies to look at how sonification can encourage alternative engagements with data, particularly marginalized data that may not be recognized through existing frameworks. It allows for a way to engage with disobedient data that is messy, marginal, and otherwise incomprehensible under dominant modes of data translation.

Digital storytelling provides new opportunities for DH as both academic fields seek to encourage dialogue, make the world comprehensible, and discover new ways of interaction with the support of digital tools (Barber, 2016). It gives us the opportunity to hear the voices missing from the historical record. How might we reimagine the democratization of and challenges to the human record?

Digital storytelling is regarded by many media researchers as an important way of embodying folk creativity with the assistance of new media forms (Burgess, 2006). From the perspective of media research, the act of storytelling itself can be closely related to the expression of social rights and unequal power distribution; the act of storytelling in traditional media channels often lacks the ability to fully represent society, thus the emergence of digital storytelling is argued by some be a part of social justice movements that challenge the power of the mainstream discourse (Canella, 2017). For GLAM practitioners, working with local communities, digital storytelling is one of their essential tools for collecting important pieces of evidence and material for preserving the memory of the community. These contain more diverse and efficient memory materials than the traditional single-form historical records used in the past, such as scattered textual archival records, undigitized old photos, un-transcribed oral history materials (audio and video recordings) and so on. We argue that it is essential to include the voices of the marginalized to democratize the historic record.

The Shanghai Memory Project gathers and aggregates data from its rich holdings, and we use a critical research method to examine and reflect on the use of digital storytelling as part of the project. These data include the voices of the ordinary people of Shanghai, and particularly the traditional vernacular (Shanghainese) dialect, which can help to redress the biases and the historical record. We acknowledge and reflect on the biases within our records that have impacted on the selection process along with ideological and other consequences to rectify the historical record (Guilliano, 2022). This is an important additional dimension to the wider Shanghai Memory project. These data fill the gaps in the historical and cultural record so that we can ‘ensure that the stories and voices which have been underrepresented in both print and digital knowledge production […] can be heard’ (Risam, 2018. p.129).

There is a great potential for DH practitioners to make use of GLAM collections to discover new material and support knowledge creation through the lens of digital storytelling. More importantly, it moves the focus from the mainstream and gathers individual and collective memories from the marginalized, the minority, the overlooked, and forgotten, what Castells (2011) calls ‘counter power’ to challenge the established historiography. Digital storytelling can be a powerful tool to influence the ‘ways in which narratives are crafted and […] the struggle over how dominant paradigms are established, reinforced and [also importantly, how they are] resisted’ (Canella, 2017. p.26). These diverse viewpoints are needed to achieve balance in the historical and cultural record.

This presentation discusses how digital humanities scholars working with archives necessarily must re-imagine their approach to communication of research findings in order to create more equitable access for community members and stakeholders. We will consider SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta as an example of a public-facing and community-engaged approach to de-archiving, and then showcasing the results of how we ultimately share and are reframing/recontextualizing archives of literary audio (recorded from the 1960s-1980s) for the public. “De-archiving,” to borrow a term from David Berry, rethinks archival practice as a process of activation rather than preservation, with the goal being to open up these collections to the public and to artists, who are in turn engaged in the process of reflecting on and responding to these works and in this way invigorating them with new meaning.

SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta houses a collection of rare literary audio recordings, and in fact our local research group began with the discovery of a cardboard box of these reel-to-reel tapes. The recordings—which include poet and sound artist performances, classroom lectures, and campus radio shows, dating back to the 1960s—are an example of the audiotext or sounded text as an emergent object of literary study (Kahn; Perloff and Dworkin; Camlot). These audiotextual works have inspired new forays into public-facing scholarship, from podcast episodes to participant-driven listening practice sessions, which seek to engage the local artistic community and wider public with these archives and, in doing so, reinvigorate them with meaning.

Our paper builds on recent theorizations of what O’Driscoll and Fong term “ethical listening,” engaging with critical questions such as: How do we be good caretakers of audio data, aural/audio histories? Who are the stakeholders represented in the collection and also what is at stake, not just in terms of our legal obligations, but our ethical and moral responsibilities? In our paper, we will discuss how creating a digital audio collection can create opportunities to open up a dialogue between scholars and artists, as well as addressing the practical implications of contacting rights holders and the process of making archival audio available and accessible to the broader research community.

Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) (980-1037 CE), the renowned physician-philosopher and polymath, lived a life of nonstop writing and constant traveling. Organizing his scholarly works was a task initiated by his disciples, continued by medieval biobibliographers, and grappled with by modern historians of philosophy and science. In my doctoral project I am interested in two of his many fields of scholarship as well as the interaction between the two—namely celestial natural philosophy (celestial physics), and mathematical astronomy. Like my fellow medieval and modern historians of Ibn Sīnā’s corpora, I found his wanderlust and prolificacy a complicating factor in tracing his authorship in time and space. In a milieu of constant political turmoil, he wrote on a multitude of topics during his nonstop journey that took him from Central Asia to West Asia. For instance, Ibn Sīnā wrote different parts of some of his summae of philosophy, such as al-Shifāʾ (The book of healing), in different times and places. In my project I needed to establish a relationship between Ibn Sīnā’s works on the general physics, celestial physics, and astronomy to trace the development of his thought, and any major shifts in the key concepts of the two fields in his corpora over time. In this paper, I first show how, using ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS online, I resolved this complication by visualizing Ibn Sīnā journey and scholarly production as a multilayered, temporally dynamic map. In my doctoral research I also ask whether or not there was a correlation between the subject matters of Ibn Sīnā’s works and the places in which they were produced. Detection of such correlation in the case of his works on celestial physics and astronomy would open the way for my historical research to focus on the moments and places where he dedicated himself to these two topics to investigate the historical causes behind it—such as patronage, existing intellectual traditions, networks of local or regional scholars, teaching those subjects, etc. In the second part of my paper, I show how, the vector data that I produced in the process of mapping, allowed me to run a geospatial analysis on ArcGIS Insights to detect the times and places where Ibn Sīnā was active in the two abovementioned fields of knowledge, and to demonstrate the quantified extent of his intellectual production. In my presentation, I will outline and discuss the workflow behind my digital humanity project including data collection, thinking about a taxonomy for data organization, choice of platform, building a geodatabase with multiple layers, temporal data visualization, and geospatial data analysis.

How can DH projects can make more sustainable choices in their approach to labour, infrastructure, methods, and access? To address these questions, we discuss our shared experience spearheading the Dragoman Renaissance Research platform, a website dedicated to the study of dragomans (diplomatic interpreter-translators) and their role in mediating relations between the Ottoman Empire and its European neighbours from ca. 1550 to ca. 1730. This decade-long collaborative DH project co-led by digital-humanities researcher and historian Natalie Rothman and digital librarian Kirsta Stapelfeldt, features research outputs (long-form narratives, visualizations, multimedia presentations) as well as comprehensive structured datasets and digital surrogates of relevant archival records. Our ongoing work on this project has provided ample opportunities for tackling the challenges of online interoperability and sustainability, and for addressing complex research needs with limited resources.

Our presentation introduces the project’s underlying Islandora-based infrastructure and approach to team work, as well as the challenges and rewards of growing a multilingual project that centres multilingual, non-Eurocentric conceptual frameworks. First, we situate the project’s genesis in relation to the academic biographies of the co-PIs and the institutional context of the Digital Scholarship Unit (DSU) of the University of Toronto Scarborough Library. We explore the inherent tensions in the DSU’s mandate to provide extensive campus-specific DH support while limiting long-term maintenance challenges. For this project, this has meant prioritizing robust data modeling and core research and presentation functions over bespoke interfaces.

Next, we explore the project’s core datasets and the methods leveraged to draw together and describe materials from multiple, multilingual archival sources and years of secondary-source publications. The resulting, iterative data model is designed to engage with complex questions of knowledge production and circulation, including emergent and evolving genres of diplomacy and statecraft. Given the project’s focus on a nuanced understanding of understudied forms, sites, and agents of knowledge production, a high level of data complexity is essential to the project’s main questions. The project thus relies on the ability to faithfully render and query heterogeneous, partial data sources as well as their layered, plural organizational systems and complex interrelationships. We discuss the project’s current entity relationship structure and reflect on the complexity of the querying it aims to facilitate.

The project is designed to license datasets and analytical outputs as open access and to allow ongoing data additions over time. In the final segment of our presentation, we address how we seek to leverage best standards in the information science community for mobilizing knowledge and participating in the emerging web, and to forward the goal of building shared vocabularies for disambiguation, and by extension linking, the work of separate scholars and communities worldwide. Specifically, we address the suitability, benefits, and challenges of using Islandora for a complex DH research project, as well as the features and workflows that the DSU has developed to accommodate the needs of this project with an eye to their wider applicability and reusability in other contexts. The approach taken in this project may help others looking to address complex DH projects sustainably.

This paper focuses on the MA thesis work of two scholars: Kim Martin, now an Assistant Professor in History at the University of Guelph, and Thomas Smith, a Master’s student of the Tri-University program in History. Martin completed her Master’s in the same program in 2004 and is now Smith’s thesis supervisor. Both projects focus on the annual Lord Mayor’s Day Pageants in London, England during the early modern period, with Martin focusing on gendered representations of the city between 1585 and 1630 and Smith focusing on the physicality of the pageant performance during the 1616 Lord Mayor’s Show Chrysanaleia. The two foci mean, of course, that the research material will differ slightly, but both are largely building from the same primary sources and leaning on secondary literature that is similar in scope.

What has undeniably changed since 2004, however, is the research process: How we, as historians, conduct our searches, locate primary and secondary sources, and access archives (Solberg, 2012, Martin and Quan-Haase, 2016, Milligan, 2019). This paper will compare and contrast the academic journeys of Martin and Smith and will document these two historian’s experiences to demonstrate the rapidly changing environment of academic history research to benefit future digital historians. To demonstrate these differences, each author will reflect upon their methodology and results, taking the following into consideration:

• What are the effects of digital tools on the search and discovery process?
• Does digital infrastructure speed up historical research?
• What new questions do digital tools allow historians to answer?

Finally, this paper will discuss the difficulties of doing digital humanities work within an academic structure that predates it. While Martin’s thesis was in a traditional written format, Smith has been working on a 3D reconstruction of a pageant cart in the London street in order to understand how it may have been understood by contemporaries. The work expectations, length of the written thesis, and skills required for completion, however, have not changed much in 20 years. How can we ensure that the labour involved in a DH thesis gets recognized, and reimagine this process so the next generation of DH scholars doesn’t have to do double the work?

Works Cited

Martin, K. and Quan-Haase, A. (2016), "The role of agency in historians’ experiences of serendipity in physical and digital information environments", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 72 No. 6, pp. 1008-1026. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2015-0144

Milligan, Ian. History in the age of abundance?: How the web is transforming historical research. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019.

Munday, Anthony. “Chrysanaleia”. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/CHRY1.htm. Accessed May 05, 2022.

Solberg, Janine. "Googling the archive: Digital tools and the practice of history." Advances in the History of Rhetoric 15, no. 1 (2012): 53-76.