Payne Theological Seminary and A.M.E. Church Archive

I've been trying to write a blog post over the last two days, but the murders in Charleston have been so horrific that I keep stopping and starting posts.  I have a few other posts forthcoming, but I decided that I needed to feature the Payne Theological Seminary and A.M.E. Church Archive. This digital collection isn't a "historical" (pre-2002) digital humanities project, but the materials on the A.M.E. Church are crucial within the context of Charleston.

The site is huge, with over 80,000 items and growing. It contains two sections: The Payne Theological Seminary materials and the A.M.E. Church Archives. The Payne Theological Seminary was launched in 1894 by the African Methodist Episcopal church to provide training to ministers. The A.M.E. material are divided into five subsections: A.M.E. Church, Church Histories, Clergy, Publishing and Women in Ministry.

The collection is searchable and features high quality images, many housed in the internet archive. The items included are stunning and the Emanuel A.M.E. Church of Charleston, South Carolina is mentioned again and again.





Richard Wright's Centennial encyclopedia of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church (1916)






















"During the first fifty years, the church was confined almost entirely to the Northern States, as it was not allowed to operate among the slaves in the South, though in Charleston, New Orleans, and one or two other places, there were small organizations among free Negroes." (5) Emanuel A.M.E. has long stood as an important symbol within the deep South.




Carter Woodson's The History of the Negro Church, 2nd edition (1921)

Woodson writes: "The African Methodists had with some difficulty under the leadership of Rev. Morris Brown established in Charleston a church reporting 1,000 members in 1817, and increasing by 1822 to 3,00- in spite of the intolerant laws and the police regulations making it difficult for slaves and free persons of color to attend. In 1822, however, because of the spirit of insurrection among Negroes following the fortunes of Denmark Vesey, who devised well laid plans for killing off the masters of the slaves, the African Methodists were required to suspend operation. Their pastor, morris Brown, was threatened and would have been dealt with foully, had it not been for the interference of General James Hamilton, who secreted Brown in his home until he could give him safe passage to the North, where he very soon reached a position of prominence, even that of bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church." (77-8)




African Methodism in the South, or, Twenty-five years of Freedom by W.J. Gaines (1890)















Emanuel A.M.E., according to Gaines, was the Mother church of the South, a title that many parishioners continue to sue. Writing of the return of Bishop Payne to Charleston, "after that long absence he returns, a man of fifty-four years of matured experience and wisdom, to take the step which has opened up a vast amount of territory to the Mother Church and spread wide her dominions." (243)

These are just a few mentions of Emanuel A.M.E. in the church documents. Martin Luther King's visit to the church in 1962 was not the first moment of resistance launched from the church. The church and its people were founded on resistance to white racism and violence and had, by the Civil Rights Era, fought for equality for over 150 years.

Guest Post: Online Tutorials from the History Courseware Consortium

I am pleased to share our first guest post! Melissa Terras graciously provided this overview of TLTP History Courseware Consortium Project. Thank you Melissa, and I welcome anyone who would like to contribute a post on an early digital project.


Guest Post: Online Tutorials from the History Courseware Consortium

The first Humanities Computing project I was employed at was in the 1997/1998 academic year at the University of Glasgow in the TLTP, History Courseware Constorium, project (http://web.archive.org/web/20030424111630/http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/TILT/TILT.html). This was funded by the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (http://www.naec.org.uk/organisations/the-teaching-and-learning-technology-programme) a multimillion pound funding programme that was launched in 1993 in the UK, supported by the main research funding bodies, with the aim of improving quality in the provision of teaching and learning through using digital technologies. It was a period of rapid expansion, and TLTP History Courseware Consortium who were tasked in providing online tutorials and readings in various aspects of history, embedding digitized primary sources into the online texts.

The main players in the TLTP History Courseware Consortium were Rick Trainor (who chaired the Steering Committee), Astrid Wissenburg (the Project Manager) and Don Spaeth (as Director), all from Glasgow, and Frank Colson (from Southampton).  There were eighty institutions in the Consortium.  Southampton was initially responsible for copyright clearance and also for production, using a hypertext environment called Microcosm developed under the direction of Wendy Hall. Glasgow later took over these areas and moved the materials into HTML; Don Spaeth had seen the launch of Mosaic at the NCSA in 1993 and it proved to be a good development platform, although the tutorials' visual design was basic.  The initial idea behind the tutorials grew out of a paper Don Spaeth gave at the UK AHC conference in 1993, called "the enriched lecture". This was literally intended to be the equivalent of an online lecture, with resources for students to view.  However, the concept expanded greatly due to huge amounts of work put in by academic authors during the process of developing TLTP materials, and experimentation with the technologies available.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030625151059/http://www.gla.ac.uk/~histtltp/

The History Coursework Consortium produced a range of online tutorials (which were around 10,000 words long each) on a variety of topics, and these were distributed to History departments around the country on a paid for CD-ROM: not only were many departments not online yet, but copyright issues meant that putting these online was not possible. There was a licensing structure worked out for distribution (http://web.archive.org/web/20031021193225/http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/tltphistory/order.htm), although the process for dealing with these licenses was manual, compared to today’s online registration systems.

One of the aims of the tutorials were to cover emergent areas where primary sources were not well covered in textbooks, and the first ones listed are “Women’s History: Major Themes in Women's History from the Enlightenment to the Second World War” and “Enfranchising Women: The Politics of women's Suffrage in Europe 1789 – 1945”.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030902022335/http://www2.gla.ac.uk/~histtltp/BROCHURE/women2.htm#Title

http://web.archive.org/web/20030902022118/http://www.gla.ac.uk/~histtltp/BROCHURE/themes.htm#Title 

These were written by a range of academic experts, and each overview tutorial provided enough material for an undergraduate course, broken down into a range of subsections which were equivalent to a lecture on the topic, with hundreds of digitised primary historical sources weaved throughout, which was an exciting bringing together of many disparate sources via digital publishing, for the time. In particular, the use of digital video materials was ambitious, and ahead of its time, years before there was any online infrastructure to help host and deliver this type of content. There was also a pioneering data exploration tool (which was an early seed for Old Bailey Online): these tutorials were really pushing what could be done with the available technology.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040114151417/http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/tltphistory/brochure/women/contents.htm 

One of the headaches of the project was copyright clearance for the primary historical texts and images used. Permissions were pursued for each and every one, and you can see from this list of historical sources

http://web.archive.org/web/20040328012020/http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/tltphistory/brochure/women/summerfi/refers/sumack.htm#Title 

just how tricky a job it was: for this one section (of 5) in one tutorial, hundreds of copyright permission statements had to be obtained. One of the project members, Ralph Wheedon, rapidly became an expert in digital copyright - and went on to work in this area at the University of Strathclyde afterwards, then onto direct the JISC Legal Service. The copyright issue contributed to the short self life of the materials: issues with copyright meant they could never be placed online, and the market moved away from CD-ROM hosted materials. Six tutorials were re-cleared in 1998-2000 for sale to schools and outside the UK, but their specialised nature, and the higher level of education that they were pitched to, meant this didn't work well.

My role on the project was slim: I was a MSc student in Computer Science at the time, having completed my MA in Art History and English literature the year before, where, in my final year in 1997, I had learnt to design webpages for an experimental delivery of my MA dissertation on Greek Art (http://www.collective.co.uk/thrones/htm/index.htm). As the TILT project was coming to a close, and given I was known to the team who had taught me web design the year before, and I was helping run tutorials for that course in 1997/98, I was asked to pitch in over the Easter holidays, helping proofreading and checking the tutorials and links once they had already been written, working full time for just three or four weeks.  The bulk of this work had already been done by the project team. It was a great temporary job – I remember thinking this academic lark pays well, compared to part time work in shops, etc – and it really helped support me over the last few months of my mostly self funded MSc.

Sadly, given that only tasters of these were put online in the first place due to copyright issues, and the main mode of delivery was via CD-ROM, means that there are no online versions of the tutorials, which is a shame as they were produced to very high editorial standards and had hundreds of images from different libraries and archives backing up the historical overviews that they provided, as well as the videos and interactive data tools. All that is left online are the tasters which remain in the web archive, which don't cover the breadth, range, and standard of the work produced.

I’m not sure that the work that went into these materials was ever appreciated, nor the bravery in pushing forward the use of digital content, including integrating digital video into the tutorials. The reports that came out of it still make for interesting reading regarding possibilities and limitations of digital pedagogy, especially since delivering online tutorials is all the rage (again!) these days.Various reports exist including:


Wissenburg, Astrid M. "TLTP History Courseware Consortium: A Project Report." History and Computing 8.1 (1996): 45-49  http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/hac.1996.8.1.45

Haywood, J., et al. "Use of TLTP Materials in UK Higher Education-a Study Conducted on Behalf of the Higher Education Funding Council for England." Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Teaching Learning and Assessment Centre (1998).


TLTP is also mentioned in Tim Hitchcock’s overview article about the digitisation of history since 1980 (http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/digitisation_of_history.html), and the activity that went into making these tutorials contributed greatly to both raising awareness of the possibilities that computing could bring to history, and establishing humanities computing as a useful endeavour, in arts and humanities departments across the UK (remember, there were eighty institutions invovled!):

“This publishing programme ensured that a substantial minority of professional historians became familiar with either authoring hypertexts, or else using them with their students. And while the programme largely failed to fulfil the aspiration to make teaching more efficient through the application of technology in a period of rapidly increasing student numbers, it did radically alter the ways in which many historians thought about computing and teaching. … this initiative helped fundamentally to alter both the profession's thinking about teaching and the curriculum and the role of computers in the presentation of historical information.” (Hitchock, http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/digitisation_of_history.html). The fact that they did so by championing topics such as Women’s History and Women’s Suffrage indicates that from the earliest adoption of WWW technologies, Humanities Computing projects were increasing understanding of lesser documented areas, using the possibility of digital technologies to bring together disparate and important primary sources in the digital environment.

Thank you to Don Spaeth for providing additional information.

CSDH/SCHN and ACH Conference wrap up

I just returned from a great conference in Ottawa, Canada. Part of the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, the CSDH/SCHN and ACH Digital Humanities Conference brought together dh scholars from around the world.

I was honored, and nervous, to give the closing keynote: DH Futures: Conflict, Power and Public Knowledge. The conference participants and twitter stream provided excellent feedback and have helped me to rethink some of my ideas. Here is the storify of the talk: https://storify.com/beherbert/joint-ach-canadian-dh-conference-2015 (side note--my husband created the storify. Look for the moment where he says--are you finished talking yet? I need to put the sheep in the barn. The life of an academic sheep herder).

Some of the talk material is drawn from my forthcoming book, Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies.  I will be reworking the new materials into an article for the organization journal, so for those of you that asked, yes you may read what I have to say shortly!

Thank again to all who provided valuable feedback. Thanks especially to Roopika Risam for a lovely introduction and to the committee for inviting me to speak.

Economics and Cultural Encoding: Milena Dobreva and Medieval Slavic Manuscript Studies in Bulgaria

I have been writing my keynote, "DH Futures: Conflict, Power and Public Knowledge," for the upcoming CSDH/SCHN and ACH Conference in Ottawa and have been thinking about some of the key tensions within our current digital humanities moment. One of the crucial issues that I am discussing is the importance of thinking through dh within national and cultural contexts. While some have criticized digital humanities for a lack of awareness to this issue, there are pioneer digital humanists who have pushed the field to engage with such concerns since the 1990s.

Today I would like to highlight Milena Dobreva's presentation, "Overview of Computer Supported Medieval Slavic Manuscript Studies in Bulgaria," from the 1999 ACH-ALLC Digital Humanities conference. Dobreva is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Library Information and Archive Sciences at the University of Malta.

In her presentation abstract Dobreva points to the robust and rich heritage of medieval Slavic manuscripts, but bemoans the limitations hampering digitization efforts. Dobreva highlights two crucial issues with which we in digital humanities continue to struggle:

1. Encoding standards that are narrow in cultural interpretation
2. The inequitable funding of digitization projects, particularly in developing countries

Dobreva writes:

"The difficulties in creating widely accepted encoding standard are caused by several reasons:

1. The sets of graphemes appearing in different manuscripts are different. In some cases the difference of graphemes represents character differences; in other cases these were variants of the same character. 
2. The encoding of specific textual features (e.g. superscript, subscript, inscript letters and abbreviations) is still debatable. Some of the specialists insist on encoding normalized texts where all these features disappear. For others, the encoding of the text in a form, which represents the original as close as possible, is a must. But even if we have a satisfactory encoding standard, we will need to build tools enabling search within encoded texts. The 'normalization' approach leads to better solution of the problem with text search, paying the price of data loss" (Overview).

The flattening in the treatment of cultural materials leads to what Dobreva rightly calls "data loss," the loss of the robustness of such materials. While we have continually expanded our treatment of encoding Dobreva's 1999 argument remains relevant. How do we represent a complex cultural heritage within the binary of computer code?

Dobreva ends her abstract by noting, "Real digitization work [of Bulgarian manuscripts] is still not undertaken. This can be explained with the economic difficulties of the Bulgarian institutions working in the field of medieval manuscript heritage" (Overview). Unfortunately we have not found a way to resolve or even minimize the discrepancies in funding that drive certain cultural heritages to be underrepresented in digital collections. Dobreva's prescient concerns remain central to the work we must continue to undertake in digital humanities. 

History of the Native Web

I checked twitter this morning and saw this:

I'm so excited to see a scholar document important early digital work in Native studies. The first blog entry from Siobhan Senier is available:

http://ssenier.indigenousnewengland.com/history-of-the-native-web/ 

 It is sad that many of these important digital projects are not being updated and that some were created by scholars who have since passed away. This is our current preservation conundrum. We really need to think about how to preserve this important early work.

Border Crossings, 1998

Border Crossings is a project that was launched in 1998 by Karla Tonella of the University of Iowa.

Described as a hypertext project, Border Crossings riffs off of Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Collecting links to various webpages that highlight divergent contested borders under the subtopics of Cyborgs, Gender, LesBiGay, Diaspora, La Frontera, Border Incidents, and Other Borders, Tonella creates a digital political art piece.

The opening page highlights the various identities and concepts the project explores. As you move through the webpages, the web design and fonts interpret the categories.

La Frontera:

Gender:

Border Incidents:

Each page collects a diverse and often contradictory list of identities: gender, sexuality, nation, geography, class, race, and ethnicity.

Tonella uses design and collection to interpret Anzaldua's claim of the impact of invisible borders on oppositional identities. By positioning links to German anti-immigrant Far Right Music against links to Music from Africa and the African diaspora, Tonella's work forces us to confront the dialectics that Anzaldua explores in Borderlands/La Frontera and her call for the new mestiza.

What strikes me as particularly interesting about Border Crossings is that never does Tonella provide a theoretical or methodological explanation of her work. Hers is an art piece digitally constructed with html and interface.  In some ways, this project is an early enactment of what in current digital humanities we talk about as the scholarship in the code. The argument formed by the interface and the construction of the webpage is related to the intellectual process of theorizing, or, as Ramsay and Rockwell note: “If the quality of the interventions that occur as a result of building are as interesting as those that are typically established through writing, then that activity is, for all intents and purposes, scholarship.” (1)

Certainly Tonella's Border Crossings is a crucial forerunner to current digital humanities work.

Unfortunately the project has come to the same end as many early dh projects:

1. Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Developing Things:  Notes Toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (U Minnesota P, 2011) 75-84, 83.

The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writings

Glynis Carr’s The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writing, constructed from 1997-2001, is an important early digital humanities and digital pedagogy project. Carefully edited to meet the standards of MLA's "Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions," the project has been included within the MLA International Bibliography.

http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/gcarr/19cUSWW/

The archive includes texts from eight women writers: Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Victoria Earle Matthews, Willa Cather, and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin). Some of these texts, such as Aunt Lindy by former slave Victoria Earle Matthews, are not available in any other digital format and have been out of print since their original publication.

Carr also includes three Zitkala-Sa articles that were published in The Atlantic Monthly. 

Carr's editing of Lydia Maria Child's stories, plays and poems originally published in The Liberty Bell remain our best contemporary edition. Some of the digital texts, such as "The Quadroons" and "Slavery's Pleasant Homes," are available as pieces of Stephen Railton's Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture, others, in the Emory Women Writers Resource Project. Some texts that Carr includes, such as "The Black Saxons," are reprinted in Carolyn Karcher's 1997 A Lydia Maria Child Reader (Duke UP). However, Carr adds texts unavailable in digital or print format including "Jan and Zaida" or "The Emancipated Slaveholders" as well as a gallery of Liberty Bell illustrations. 

The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing is carefully edited, as documented by the Textual Notes and Editorial Practices statements. In fact, I would argue that Carr's digital project is as well edited as any university press published text and should remain our definitive edition of many of the included women writers'  works.

Glynis Carr produced the project with a small number of undergraduate students, without a digital humanities center or library support, and published the project on her personal faculty page at Bucknell University. Student contributors include Jon C. Adams, Kate Barmak, Courtney Curzi, Jacob H. Frechette, Katey Kuhns Castellano, Jennifer L. Ciotta, Kathy Davis, and Jacob H. Frechette.

Carr described the project "as a laboratory for teaching students at Bucknell University the principles and practices of textual editing. In addition to developing the familiar skills of literary research and criticism, students contributing to The Archive learn about the processes by which publishers prepare texts for readers and thus gained valuable professional skills, including some technological ones that normally make but a shadowy appearance in the literature curriculum" (Preface).  This description sounds very similar to how those of us who work with digital pedagogy projects describe our contemporary projects, a reminder of Carr's important position within digital humanities and digital pedagogy.

If you have additional information about The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writings, please let me know.