This spring was busy, between making progress on projects, teaching Data Visualization with Textiles, and laying the the groundwork for next year.
Textile Makerspace
The Textile Makerspace continues to thrive, with five student staff in the spring supporting the students in the Data Visualization with Textiles independent study, as well as the many people who come by to make and mend things.
This quarter has involved some struggles with equipment: our coverstitch has been acting up, and what I thought was a catastrophic digital knitting machine failure turned out to be an issue with the Arduino-based USB interface. This summer I want to actually get the digital knitting machine up and running with a new Arduino. It's a pity that we weren't able to diagnose and fix it in time for the students in this year's class to use, since there was a lot of enthusiasm for the digital knitting machine, but here's hoping I can get it working by the fall. It turns out that one of the developers for the open-source software you use to control the Arduino component lives in the Bay Area, and I'm hoping we can meet up at some point.
I started work on a handbook of textile data visualization early in the quarter, but work on it stalled due to more pressing deadlines. I've already reached out to some of the students about including some of the things they've made and written about as part of it, and I'm hoping to have some kind of preliminary draft ready in time for next year's class.
This quarter I was part of submitting a panel proposal to ACH 2024 around textile making, and work has begun on planning the #DHmakes pre-conference event at DH 2024 this summer.
The memorial service for my colleague John Giammalva was at the end of May, and I organized a few sessions for people who knew him to come by and write (or in the case of the ambitious, embroider) a message on a quilt square. I assembled all the squares into a quilt -- the second I've ever attempted -- as a gift for his widow. During the reception, the quilt and markers were on hand for people to add more words of remembrance and thanks. I was quite happy with how the whole thing came together: from the initial idea the day of the first memorial gathering after his passing, to the final implementation.
This was the last quarter for Akasha Hayden and Ciara Siobhan; Akasha has been by right-hand person for some time now, and Ciara did some marvelously transformative organization work in the space during their time in the Makerspace. Thanks once again to the generosity of the Making@Stanford initiative, Jacob Rodriguez from the Makery and I received funding for a pool of "textile specialists" we can share between our spaces next year. Over the summer, Jordan Minion will be staffing the space for regular hours, and Kelsey Chen will be doing a kickoff for Summer Session and staffing additional hours. I'm happy we're at a point where summer hours are viable for the Makerspace, since it's a better time for many people.
Classes
This is the second year I've offered Data Visualization with Textiles, and despite setting the cap at the same number of students I had last year (18, which far exceeded my expected 5) and doing nothing to advertise the class, my inbox started filling up with requests to get into the class as soon as registration opened, as it hit the cap immediately. This year I just said yes to everyone who asked, and after the churn of the first couple weeks, I ended up with 24 students. Because the Makerspace has been getting popular, we had to set aside certain hours as "office hours" for just those students in the class, with a sign-up sheet and a cap of 5 people, indicating what they were working on so that we wouldn't end up with a long line at the embroidery machine or what-not.
The students' final projects are still coming in, but the ones I've read so far have been an absolute delight in the data the students chose and prepared, how they thought about transforming it into textiles, and what they ultimately created. At the end of the quarter I worked with the folks at Hohbach Hall to organize an end-of-the-year showcase of student work and other textile creations from the Stanford maker community, along with some remarkable textile-related pieces from Special Collections, including a recently-acquired silk-woven book. Huge thanks to Erin Thajudeen who took care of all the logistics for the Spec materials while I was juggling other pieces of the event. In the end, only a few of the students' pieces were done in time for the showcase, but next year I'll plan further ahead and set that as a deadline. It's definitely an event that I'll be repeating.
I also had the chance to talk with Hideo Mabuchi, Nilan Ram, David Schneider, and Aaron Straight about how we teach data visualization / physicalization, and do some dreaming about what some larger interdisciplinary version of that might be in the future.
In addition to the data visualization class, I ran the usual DH Practicum this quarter, which was a really enjoyable opportunity to work with students I haven't done much with before on a new set of projects.
Existing projects
I've been the roadblock for a lot of things with The Data-Sitters Club, which I will rectify this summer by posting all the things I've got queued up. In the meantime, the group wrote a piece for a special issue "On Gathering" of the Journal of Electronic Publishing edited by Katina Rogers.
The project on Senegalese Countercultural Movements has been in a holding pattern for the quarter, but there's been some movement on the Global Medieval Sourcebook and we have a plan in place to simplify the site and finish editing the content during the summer. I was happy that Ty Davidian submitted a proposal to the ACH conference for The Futurist Archive and Tania Flores did the same for her Flamenco letras project.
HPC for Humanists and DLCL dissertations continue to be on hold, but I'm looking forward to revisiting it as part of a new initiative I'm organizing starting this summer in the DLCL. DLCL alumni data is mostly done, with a few revisions needed as part of promotional materials for the department.
Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic continues to be my most-stalled project that I'm still unwilling to give up completely on. I'm hoping that mid-August might be the time I can actually focus and wrap it up, as a way to get the work that's been done on it out in the world.
It's been a much better quarter for the Jewish cookbooks project with Eitan Kensky. I wrote some code to (very roughly) parse the OCR'd cookbooks into recipes, and threw together a proof-of-concept prototype interface for the recipes that Simon Wiles quickly turned into something much more functional. Data cleanup work will continue over the summer, and Eitan and I are working with Kristen Vallenti on an exhibit of Jewish food cultures in Hohbach Hall in the fall that will incorporate some material from these cookbooks.
I've continued working with Chloé Brault Mackinnon on her project "Where is the world for Quebec", analyzing geospatial references in Quebecois literature.
Having Audrey Gao as the SILICON project manager has been fantastic -- in no time at all, she's organized a summer intern program, organized our files, is working through various paperwork issues, made a new website, and is taking care of all the things that all of us who've been working on SILICON as part of 20 other things have been too stretched to do. I'm really excited about how that project is coming together, and I put in a proposal for the students to speak about their projects at the ACH conference in the fall. I've continued attending, as schedules permit, meetings of the Script Encoding Working Group, and it has been both fascinating and deeply enjoyable to learn more about how the group operates.
The Browsertrix Cloud pilot continues to be a tremendously useful resource, both for library-internal use (e.g. as part of working on a NEH-funded project exploring what would be involved in recovering data from, or at least archiving, scholarly websites) and for faculty research use.
Despite considerable progress and a clear set of next steps, the Arabic OCR work stalled in the spring after Research Data Services discontinued funding the student assistant, and CESTA funding didn't happen fast enough to prevent the project losing momentum. It is starting up again this summer, and I look forward to participating. Meanwhile, Transkribus interest on campus continues to grow: I've had consultations with Amanda Whitmire (who's using it for typewritten theses), Anna Jerve (looking to use it for metadata cards from the geology collection), and Alice Staveley (who has a longstanding project on Virginia Woolf) about it recently. I connected Amanda with Simon Wiles who put together a Python script for batch processing with Transkribus.
Progress has continued on the development of the Environmental Humanities minor, and I'm excited to have the Textile Makerspace be part of the vision for that program.
I've largely punted the website accessibility issues off to the summer, along with the AI working group, out of consideration for various collaborators' deadlines.
At the beginning of this month, Roopika Risam and I passed the ACH presidency torch to Lauren Tilton and Andy Janco. It's one of the first times I've ever been able to hand something big over to someone else. It was strange but very satisfying writing "presidential transition" emails that spelled out what I had gotten done, what I hadn't managed to finish, and where various initiatives were. While I'm no longer the voting representative of ACH on the ADHO Constituent Organization Board, I'm still serving as secretary through the DH conference this summer.
New projects
With everything else going on, I can't say I minded having last quarter's new projects get off to a slower start, and for once I managed to avoid adding many more new projects to my plate. One of the only new ones involves working with Adrian Daub and Bethany Nichols on analyzing a corpus of letters to Christine Blasey Ford, which poses more than a few interesting challenges for my go-to methods, given their diversity in length and content. Another is Òscar Ferrer i Bech's project compiling data about opera houses and articles about the operas that were performed there, in Cuba and beyond.
One thing that I did start exploring, though, was the idea of a "DH Co-Op" (a working title, may be renamed) centered on non-English languages and literatures. The current vision, based on a handful of conversations and a survey of likely participants, is for biweekly or monthly meetings with a mix of workshops, project co-working, and Q&A. I'm imagining, too, using this group to test out my HPC for Humanists instructions, building corpora, and maybe collaborating on a project or two. I'll be trying to pilot it this summer with whoever happens to be around, and then refining it a little starting in the fall.
Writing
The article with Lauren Tilton on ACH DMCA advocacy came out in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, and the piece on data visualization with a circular knitting machine came out in DH + Lib. I managed to do somewhat considerable revisions on the Unicode article for the Journal of Electronic Publishing, which is now moving forward with publication. Thanks to a very long flight delay, I also wrote a piece with Amanda Visconti and Claudia Berger tracing the development of #DHmakes for the inaugural issue of the new journal of the Korean Association of Digital Humanities. Thanks to their astonishingly efficient peer review turnaround time, it should be coming out this summer. I'm also working with Adrian Daub on an article wrapping up our examination of different language Wikipedia articles on "cancel culture".
I didn't succeed at all in regular blogging, but did write one blog post on the joy of maximalist pedagogy in DH.
Talks and events
I was invited to give the Windsor Lecture at my library school alma mater, the University of Illinois, and it was a pleasure to get to return there, and to share some thoughts about how libraries can be made more sustainable for the people doing the work by thinking differently about library leadership and how staff can support one another in exploring the ideas they're passionate about.
I also had the opportunity to talk about multilingual corpus building with Transkribus at the University of Washington, and get to know the people and projects going on up there. I'm excited about the possibilities for more west coast collaboration.
I attended Phil Gleissner's talk on "Queer Digital Humanities for Precarious Times: The Project kvir_izdat", which also has some potential for ongoing collaboration with the growing group of Slavic DH folks here at Stanford. It'd be nice to have a reason to return to the Russian feminist / lesbian zine The Island, the full run of which we had digitized prior to the pandemic.
In May, there was a celebration of 10 years of the Authors Alliance at the Internet Archive, and it was a joy to attend wearing the shawl I wove out of a text analysis of their petition to expand the DMCA exemption for text and data mining, and the responses from copyright holders.
I organized the textile data visualization showcase at the end of the quarter, and plan to make that an annual event.
Other things
I served on the advisory board for the Mathematical Humanists NEH-funded program, helping select participants for the first round of workshops.
Finally, it was an honor to have been nominated for the Amy J. Blue award, honoring "staff members who are exceptionally dedicated, supportive of colleagues and passionate about their work".