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On Thursday, December 5 at 12pm-1:15pm at the CDH, the Slavic DH Working Group will co-host an works-in-progress project talk by Ada Dialla, Associate Professor of European History at the Department of Theory and History of Art, School of Fine Arts (Athens) and Visiting Fellow in the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton, Fall 2019.

Professor Dialla’s presentation aims to discuss the collaborative and the interdisciplinary research project “The Greek Revolution of 1821: Digital Archive” (organized and implemented by the Research Center for the Humanities based in Athens). The project seeks a) to build a digital archive b) to provide a platform for researches and the broader public with a variety of material (archives, collections, works of art, everyday objects, folk songs, and other historical artifacts) c) to raise new research questions with an emphasis on the European, transnational and global
context of the Revolution. Professor Dialla will also present a) material concerning Greek-Russian trans-cultural relations and b) examples of using the archival content to produce digital historical narratives, scenarios, and exhibits.

This event will be co-sponsored by Hellenic Studies, the Slavic Digital Humanities Working Group, and the Center for Digital Humanities.

Lunch will be provided!

Slavic Studies DH is having a moment. The energy has been building for some time: North American Slavists are joining the active DH affiliate group of our main professional organization (ASEEES), and DH initiatives are thriving across Russia. Slavic DHers from around the globe met at last summer’s major annual DH conference in Utrecht, speaking at the first-ever panel dedicated to issues specific to our field, and excitedly planning future collaborations.  

This enthusiasm was felt in September at a workshop at Princeton. Focusing on the topic of DH and visual culture, the four-day event — “Digital Humanities and Visual Resources: The Material and Digital Lives of Eastern European and Russian Artifacts” — gathered thirty scholars from North America and Europe, all at different career stages and with various levels of DH experience. The event was organized by Princeton’s Slavic Digital Humanities Working Group along with partners from the Herder Institute for East Central European History in Marburg, Germany, Stanford University, and Haverford College. Interdisciplinary by design, the workshop gave participants an immersive experience with the practical, theoretical, organizational, and social aspects of digital humanities work. 

Our goal was to investigate new opportunities for studying visual cultural heritage — images, paintings, photographs, etc. — from digital or computational angles. Experience working on Princeton’s Playing Soviet, a DH project by Katherine Reischl and Thomas Keenan on illustrated Soviet children’s books, taught us that studying the digital must start with engaging the analog. So our workshop kicked off with a trip to Princeton’s Special Collections to explore visually compelling Russian and Soviet periodicals and books from the early twentieth century. We probed our methodological assumptions and asked: how do we look beyond text? What visual literacy is required to read the artifacts, experiments, and artwork before us? What happens to the visual language of the object when it is translated onto the screen?  

The opening keynote by Glen Worthey, formerly Digital Humanities Librarian at Stanford and now at HathiTrust, prompted our explorations further. In “Speaking Figuratively: What Does Text Have To Do With Image?”, Glen walked us through some of his favorite examples from the Russian Baroque, children’s literature, and 19th-century cartography that cross visual and textual boundaries. In this scholarly retrospective, Glen harkened back to his graduate-school investigations of Pushkin and showed us how visual methods — ranging from analog to digital “cut and paste” and color coding — helped him deconstruct Pushkin’s poetry and solve some of the text’s mysteries. 

 Understanding the interplay between tool, method, and argument was central to our hands-on sessions. Each day consisted of a series of workshops, expertly led by Quinn Dombrowski (Academic Technology Specialist, Stanford) and Andy Janco (Digital Scholarship Librarian, Haverford). Quinn and Andy showed us the broad landscape of Slavic DH, pointing out the wealth of projects and data available for our field. They also dove deep into strategies for metadata design for digital exhibits, platforms and tools such as Omeka, Tropy, and Palladio, and computer vision. Participants had ample time to experiment with tools and get individual guidance.

One of the week’s highlights was the lightning talks, where participants presented their individual research projects. The richness of material and expertise was inspiring. Projects ranged from the history of film screenings in 1920s Russia, to Soviet women photographers, to vexillology, to 20th-century religious iconography in emigration, to Uzbek communities in China. Hearing how scholars of history, literature, art history, and film approach visual material, and how they imagine visually conveying their arguments through digital means, generated true interdisciplinary conversations. Project summaries were recorded in the #SlavicDH hashtag on Twitter.

Throughout the sessions, speakers encouraged participants to step back and consider the broader implications of technology’s impact on our research and society. In a panel discussion on “Legal and Ethical Issues in Working with Digitized Visual Resources,” Peter Haslinger (Director of the Herder Institute), Holly Hatheway (Marquand Art Librarian at Princeton), and Toma Tasovac (DARIAH and Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities) discussed the thorny issues of copyright and intellectual property, and how new channels of information sharing are transforming scholarly labor. 

Our closing keynote emphasized the responsibility of DH researchers to engage with technology humanistically. Speaking from the perspective of Europe’s main initiative for digital scholarship in the arts and humanities, DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) director Toma Tasovac’s talk was titled  “Thinking Infrastructurally.” The power of infrastructures, he reminded us, is that when they are invisible, they not only provide structure but can also inscribe and enforce existing inequities and bias. Toma argued for radically surfacing our digital scholarship infrastructures: critiquing the tools and methods, sharing workflows and data, providing documentation, and sharing resources openly. The digital can be used to recontextualize — not replace — the analog. Bringing us back to the Slavic Studies context, Toma discussed his project Raskovnik, a research platform in Serbian lexicography, as an example of an infrastructural approach where historical, literary, and cultural heritage is made accessible, reusable, and open to creative computational interventions.

Recognizing that Slavic DH has found a certain momentum, we kept returning to the question of next steps. How and where can we best channel our energy; how can we be of most service to our colleagues and our field? How can we best advocate for the support, visibility, and recognition of DH work? What can we learn from the other disciplines that have engaged DH, and what can Slavic Studies give back to the broader DH community? These are open questions that we will continue to address in upcoming conferences, meetings, and conversations. 

Luckily, we’ve got quite a few options for where to connect and cultivate Slavic DH. In the next few weeks, many of us will attend the DH panels and pre-conference workshop at ASEEES in San Francisco. Some will meet at the DARIAH Annual Event in Zagreb in May, or at DH2020 in Ottawa this summer. And perhaps most exciting is that the larger DH community will have a chance to experience Russian DH firsthand: it was recently announced that next year’s European Association for DH (EADH) Conference will be in Krasnoyarsk in September 2020.

This workshop was co-organized by Princeton University, the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, and Stanford University. We acknowledge the generosity of sponsors: the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), the Slavic Department, the Center for Digital Humanities, the Humanities Council Global Initiative and David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Fund, the Princeton University Library, the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (REEES), the Department of Art History, the Center for Collaborative History, and European Cultural Studies.

The opening keynote for the 2019 DH Slavic Summer School is Stanford’s Glen Worthey, “Speaking Figuratively: What Does Text Have To Do With Image?” The talk will take place on Tuesday Sept. 3, 2019 at 4:30pm, Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building, 399.

What is the relationship between “image” and “text”?  Are they utterly distinct data types, or are they rather ranges on a continuum?  Or are they the same, but only differently-scaled?

This talk will be a personal essay of sorts, putting a digital humanities spin on a hodgepodge of diverse examples — from the Russian baroque to Pushkin to early Soviet picture books; from OCR to AI.  These are intended not as a showcase of successes, but rather a cabinet of my own curiosities, into which I invite you for further exploration and speculation.

Glen Worthey has been Digital Humanities Librarian at Stanford since 1997, and was founding head of Stanford’s Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR).  He’s held many roles in the international DH community, most recently co-chair of the DH2018 conference in Mexico City.  His graduate work (ABD) was in Russian children’s literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Wrapping up our 2019 DH Slavic Summer School will be Toma Tasovac, Director of DARIAH-EU and Director of the Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities, titled“Thinking Infrastructurally: What’s In It forHumanities Scholars?” The talk will take place on Thursday Sept. 5, 2019 at 4:30pm,  Wallace Hall, 300.

How can humanities scholars think infrastructurally? How would that effect the way we conduct and disseminate our research? Can we build research infrastructures without subscribing to the insidious master narratives of efficiency and progress? This talk will also touch upon the value of infrastructural thinking for the Slavic Studies field, citing examples from the Raskovnik Serbian dictionary platform and the Prepis.org transcription project.

Toma Tasovac is Director of the Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities (BCDH) and Director of the pan-European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH). His areas of interest include lexicography, data modeling, TEI, digital editions and research infrastructures.

Reflections on a Workshop: DH and Russian Literary Studies

By Olga Zolotareva

What can algorithms do for the humanities? How can technology befriend Russian literature?

Story crossposted on Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton website here. 

On May 28, the “Slavic DH Workshop: Russian Literary Studies in the Digital Age,” sponsored by the Slavic DH Working Group at Princeton, showed that there are many ways to answer these questions. The presenters – Frank Fischer and Boris Orekhov, researchers at the Higher School of Economics Centre for Digital Humanities in Moscow – gave an interactive overview of some of the DH tools that could benefit a scholar of Russian literature. An audience of about twenty Slavists – from Princeton, as well as from Rutgers, Haverford College, Yale, Hunter College, Swarthmore College, and other area colleges and universities – gathered for a stimulating day of collaborative learning. 

The presenters began by charting the history of Digital Humanities in Russia – from the modernist writer Andrei Bely’s predilection for quantitative methods of studying literature to Russia joining the European Association for Digital Humanities in 2017. In between we learned about the uniquely Russian approach to the computational methods in humanities in the 20th century: from philologist Boris Yarkho (1889-1942), who sought to bring scientific precision to his discipline; to the mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov’s (1903-1987) seminars; to computer scientist Andrei Ershov’s (1931-1988) corpus of Russian (1978-2006); to the scholarly “History and Computers” Association. The session then pivoted to DH initiatives that exist in Russia today. These include Russian National Corpus, digital libraries (such as Maksim Moshkov’s Library and Russian Virtual Library), and Prozhito – a unique project which digitizes diaries, both past and contemporary, and which is sustained by the dedication of volunteers. The Higher School of Economics alone co-sponsors the Moscow-Tartu Digital Humanities School and has recently started a new master’s program that trains digital humanists – all in addition to running the Centre for Digital Humanities.

The next session, “Programmable Corpora: A New Infrastructural Concept for Digital Literary Studies,” provided an insight into some of the technologies used by the researchers at the Centre. The term “programmable corpora” refers to the drama corpora hosted by the Drama Corpora Project, or DraCor. The platform, which is slated for expansion, allows users to create network graphs of data gathered from around the web of German, Russian, Greek, and Spanish plays, as well as plays by Shakespeare. The data makes it possible, for example, to visualize how characters engage with each other throughout a play; as Fischer pointed out, the graphs featured on DraCor incorporate even the characters left off dramatis personae lists. Fischer 

also showed how one could create one’s own graph: all that is required is the software RStudio and a metadata file that can be downloaded from DraCor. When it comes to using these graphs in teaching, sometimes a computer is not even necessary: Fischer introduced the audience to a card game with a self-explanatory title Brecht Beats Shakespeare! – A Card-Game Introduction to the Network Analysis of European Drama, which invites participants to compare graphs based on different plays.

Data visualization is key to another DH initiative – the monumental corpus of Leo Tolstoy’s collected works, introduced by Boris Orekhov in the next installment of the workshop. The fruit of a collaboration between Tolstoy Museum in Moscow and Higher School of Economics, the corpus, which comprises 90 downloadable volumes of Tolstoy’s writings, is equipped with a searchable index of proper names that can be encountered in Tolstoy’s texts. A search for a proper name yields not only the links to the volumes where it occurs, but also a graph that shows what other names are mentioned alongside it in Tolstoy’s corpus. This feature, as Orekhov pointed out, could be invaluable to researchers seeking to take the full measure of Tolstoy’s erudition. A word cloud showing the most common proper names is another useful feature of the corpus, especially given that each word is clickable. Although the index does not include fictional proper names, these can be found through another search tool, which is tied to the same 90-volume corpus and which can be used to search for any word, whether it is a proper name or not. The search can be customized using several parameters, including, helpfully, the possibility of limiting it only to letters, or only to Tolstoy’s fiction.

If humans need such signposts to navigate vast amounts of text, neural networks can simply plough through them. The last presentation, “Neural Network Poetry Meets Distant Reading: Analyzing Computer-Generated Echoes of Russian Literary History,” focused on what happens when a neural network analyzes a body of work of a particular poet (or poets) and then creates poetry of its own. As Boris Orekhov noted, computer-generated poetry in itself is not new, its history reaching back into 1940s; and yet, he pointedly outlined, there is a fundamental difference between the “creative efforts” of neural networks and the computer poetry that existed previously. Before the advent of neural networks, the machine would compose poetry in an arbitrary manner – either by jumbling phrases from the work of a particular writer or by stringing random words on a preprogrammed grammatical frame. Neural networks, on the other hand, dispense with arbitrariness: they identify the recurring features of the corpus they analyze. As we learned from the session, although networks do not fare particularly well when they are fed narrative poetry, they are vastly more successful when working with experimental, rule-bending texts – such as the poetry of N.M. Azarova. In this latter case, the neural network yielded poems strikingly similar to Azarova’s texts, down to their alliteration. This is why one of Orekhov’s suggestions for how to use such poems in teaching was to ask students to identify whose works “inspired” a neural network.

The conversation about the educational uses of neural networks was a fitting coda to the day. Indeed, the “Slavic DH Workshop” has shown that digital humanities not merely promise to diversify our teaching, learning, and research practices, but also deliver on that promise.  

The slides of all four presentations are provided by Frank Fischer and are available at https://twitter.com/umblaetterer/status/1133360545523015681.

Slavic DH Workshop: Russian Literary Studies in the Digital Age

9:30–10:30am Introduction: The State of Digital Humanities in Russia

10:45am–12:15pm “Programmable Corpora:” A New Infrastructural Concept for Digital Literary Studies

Lunch

1:30-3:00pm Tolstoy Everywhere: Unleashing the Information Hidden in the 90-Volume “Collected Works”

An overview and exploration of the 91st Volume Project, a digitized index for the collected works of Leo Tolstoy

3:30- 5pm Neural Network Poetry Meets Distant Reading: Analyzing Computer-Generated Echoes of Russian Literary History

A discussion of the historical origins of computer-generated poetry and an introduction to neural-net approaches as a new practice of distant reading

Presenters:

RSVP by Thursday May 23 here.

This event will take place at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, B Floor of Firestone Library, Princeton New Jersey. Please note that non-Princeton guests must RSVP for access to Firestone Library. Information for visitors here.

Learn about the theories, methods and practice of digital humanities (DH) in the Slavic and East European fields at the 2019 Slavic DH Summer Workshop, taking place at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ) September 3-6, 2019.

The thematic focus of the 2019 Workshop is “Digital Humanities and Visual Resources: The Material and Digital Lives of Eastern European and Russian Artifacts.”

The four-day event will combine short instructional sessions, keynote lectures, works-in-progress presentations by participants, and free time for individual research with optional consultations with workshop instructors. The event will also include a day spent at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, home of the renowned Russian & Soviet Nonconformist Art collection.

The instructional sessions on DH tools and methods will be aimed at beginning, intermediate and more advanced audiences. Possible workshop topics (to be finalized with input from accepted participants) include: structured metadata design, linked open data, OmekaS, deep learning for automatic image recognition, and the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).  

All scholars working the Slavic and East European fields – faculty, postdocs, librarians, archivists, technologists, graduate students and undergraduates – are eligible to apply.  No previous experience in digital humanities is necessary.

A particular aim of the Slavic DH Summer Workshop is to foster international collaborations and strategic discussions about the infrastructures needed to promote Slavic and East European digital humanities scholarship in the global context.

We hope to offer at least partial funding for accepted workshop participants, but funding is not guaranteed.

Priority will be given to applications received by March 23, 2019. Funding will be allocated on a first come, first-served basis.

Application should include:

1. Statement of interest (no more than 500 words) which should indicate how attending this workshop will benefit your scholarly or professional goals. Briefly describe your current DH project(s), if applicable.
2. CV
3. Preferred DH tools or methods for the instructional sessions
4. Funding request (please break down by cost of flight, ground transportation, lodging, food). Please indicate alternative or supplemental funding sources available.

Email questions and proposals to nataliae@princeton.edu

This workshop is co-organized by Princeton University, the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, and Stanford University, and follows the successful 2018 Summer School on Digital Mapping.

Keynote lectures by:

Toma Tasovac,  Director for DARIAH and Director of the Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities

Glen Worthey, Digital Humanities Librarian in the Stanford University Libraries and Co-Lead of the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), and Head of Humanities Text Services

Workshop organizing committee includes:

Quinn Dombrowski (Academic Technology Specialist, Stanford)

Natalia Ermolaev (Assistant Director, Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton)

Holly Hatheway (Head, Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton)

Peter Haslinger (Director, Herder Institute)

Thomas Keenan (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Librarian, Princeton)

Margarita Nafpaktitis (Curator for the Slavic and East European Collections, Stanford)

Katherine Reischl (Assistant Professor, Slavic Dept, Princeton)

My First Academic Conference: A Roadmap to Mapping Messiness

by Jianing Zhao (class of 2020, Slavic major)

“I’m a trained cartographer, and I love maps because they lie.” We all laughed at this remark made by a participant on the first day of our workshop, but it turned out to be one of my most important takeaways.

More about “digital mapping” than about “Eastern Europe,” this workshop united experts across disciplines who work on diverse topics ranging from gentrification in US cities to community-managed national parks in Belize. Even though English was the third or forth language for many workshop participants, our research methodology – mapping – served as our common language.  This allowed me, an undergraduate majoring in Slavic and with interest in Classical archeology, but with little background on Eastern Europe, to be able to understand presentations on unfamiliar topics, to draw inspiration from their DH methods, and to reflect on their applicability to my own research project. It is rather unique that an academic conference can feel so beginner-friendly, while providing a great roadmap –not of what to do, but of what to look for and what to look out for.

The first thing we learned about mapping was what challenges to expect, such as the fluid borders and the variety of geographical names. These elements of tension stayed in the back of my mind as the workshop progressed, constantly nudging and reminding me that data is often messy, borders are often blurry, and maps are only models. Are borders necessary at all? I thought. What if we just map the dots – locations of pottery finds across the ancient Mediterranean, for example, to trace regional influences and developments in pottery style? I was excited to discover that the keynote speaker, Katharina Lorenz, is a classical archaeologist. It was such a pleasant surprise, and a truly eye-opening talk as she introduced various applications of mapping as a way to visualize events and places in historical processes. Stanford’s Orbis project, for example, renders geographical distance as time distance to illustrate routes and constraints related to travel in the Roman world. This indirectly responded to my previous thought about the intricacies of juxtaposing time and space in maps.

But new questions started to surface– more theoretical, systematic ones: how do we approach digital mapping when geospatial practices are already an intrinsic part of the discipline? For example, mapping with digital tools such as Total Station and RTI has been integral practices in archaeology for long, so does it count as digital humanities? Why do we never say “digital physics”? It was as if the keynote speaker saw the questions in my head, since she soon brought out an important point: Digital mapping must be approached as a research method, not a means of making or illustrating arguments: reading-in, not reading-from. It was a moment of epiphany for me. For as long as I’ve been exposed to DH, it draws me in like a blackhole – I’m eager to incorporate DH methods in my projects, without having thoroughly thought through what exactly I want to find or argue, and why DH is necessary to help me achieve that.

Let me take a step back. On the evening of the second day of the workshop, I finally started doing the preliminary research I should have done long ago for my potential thesis project – on Russian émigrés in Paris during the interwar period. I looked at DH projects on relevant topics and scopes to see how I can do similarly or differently. The whole environment of the workshop was deeply motivating – I searched, I reflected, I planned, and for the first time in my life, I feel like a real academic, even though I’m just an undergraduate at the very beginning of my academic career. I changed my major to Slavic following this workshop, and am going to Moscow this winter for a first round of archival research. But these are just the tip of the iceberg.

I started really paying attention to what kinds of data I need, what kinds of data I have, and what to do to bridge the gap in between. For the data I’ll have, I already know that they will not all fall into neat categories. Paris in the interwar period is a huge messy web of people, events, and connections, and how to map this messiness will be a question I soon need to face – as well as why I want to map it. Maps lie, but if they lie well, we might be able to tell some truths from their lies. This workshop taught me how to read maps by telling truths from lies, and inspired me to makes maps that lie well.

by Thomas Keenan (Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies Librarian)

Over the five-day digital mapping workshop held in beautiful Marburg, Germany, our gracious hosts at the Herder Institut created a wonderfully comfortable and productive atmosphere of enthusiasm, cooperation, and generosity — the perfect environment for the discussion of tentative ideas and the possibilities and limitations of status-quo digital technologies for a broad range of in-progress or prospective projects. The topic of the workshop was digital mapping, but for me personally, the most valuable part of the interactions was the more macro-level conceptual discussions of the digital humanities. As a humanist by training, for whom computational research methods are still a largely unfamiliar category, the workshop provided a near ideal venue for the entertainment of my hopes and doubts vis-à-vis a digital future for the humanities. A palpable vigorous enthusiasm was at all times tempered with salutary skepticism, which forestalled the kind of naïve exuberance or evangelistic tone one sometimes encounters in DH forums. The relaxed and open atmosphere and the very collegial and receptive assembly of researchers from the Herder, Princeton, and institutions in Poland, Hungary and Ukraine made the whole workshop an organically cooperative event, and in a sense modeled precisely the kind of complementary-expertise collaboration without which digital humanities projects are impossible, a cooperative research mode generally unfamiliar to humanists who are accustomed to more solitary scholarly enterprises.

The time spent learning about the Herder Institut’s highly impressive research collections for the study of Eastern Europe left me wanting to come up with a project that will take me back there for more intensive exploration.

For me, though, the most memorable moment from the workshop was a discussion about the disciplinary boundaries of the humanities themselves and the effect on those boundaries of the introduction of computational methods. At one point Princeton’s own Natasha Ermolaev raised the question of whether, over time, the qualifier “digital” in “digital humanities” will become redundant, as digital technologies continue to advance, literary and artistic canons continue to expand, and the scope of humanistic inquiry continues to expand beyond those canons. Will the use of computational methods in the humanities become so much a matter of course that the “digital” qualifier will fall away? After all, no one uses this qualifier now for fields of inquiry that traditionally deal in numerical data; no one talks about “digital science” or even “digital social science” (although I myself would argue that many of the “digital humanities” projects I’ve seen showcased are more social-scientific than humanistic). Natasha’s question occasioned very productive contemplations of some very difficult and interesting problems. One was the theoretical question of the boundaries between disciplinary approaches. Are digital methods now becoming applicable to humanities research, in a way they long have been to social science research, precisely because the humanities as a discipline are morphing into something more social-scientific? Can the targets of humanistic inquiry traditionally conceived really be made available to computationally assisted “distant readings”? If, rather than engaging them as meaningful works on their own terms, we look at literary texts and other artworks as social constructs or the products of social forces (economic, political, ideological, etc.), are we engaged in social-scientific rather than humanistic investigations? This brought in the distinction between data more traditionally conceived, i.e. numeric data, and things like literary texts, musical works and visual artworks which have come to be included in the new expanded definition of data. It also touched on the very difficult problem of the convertibility of exponents of the latter category of data, historically viewed as processible exclusively by human subjects, into the former category so they can be processed by machines. From this followed the perhaps even thornier questions of which elements of humanistic inquiry and analysis can and/or should be relegated to automated or automatable processes.

The project presented by Aaron Shkuda was an interesting test case for some of these questions of the boundaries between humanistic and social-scientific inquiry and the applicability of computational methods to different components of a research question. His project looked at the art scene that exploded in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan from the 1960s through the 1980s, and at the associated gentrification of that neighborhood. A variety of plottable data points (locations of galleries and other businesses, demographic data, economic data), mapped onto a cartographic representation of the neighborhood, produced an informative partial picture of the SoHo gentrification process. Ultimately, though, it seemed that complementary, more traditional humanistic components might be necessary to explore the x factor of the enormous impact of the artworks that were the ostensible catalyst for this very particular, now iconic, instance of the gentrification phenomenon.

For me the most valuable takeaway from the workshop was the conviction that it is critical that the academy make large investments now in the kinds of experimental research that will eventually define the evolving roles of computational technologies in the likewise evolving understanding and analyses of the products of human artistic expression. Without this investment, the academy risks forfeiting its rightful role in shaping the way the humanist legacy is represented in the digital realm. The time at the Herder Insitut brought into sharper focus the urgency of immediate, committed, vigorous engagement in digital humanities research. It left me assured that questions of how computational technologies and methods will, should, and should not affect humanities research are ones the academy really cannot afford not to address. I came away from the workshop feeling that my own mandate, given my particular role in the academy, was to be the best possible advocate for investment in this kind of experimental work amid a research-institution culture that has become intensely focused on short-term, forecastable results. One of the most formidable challenges for DH advocates as a whole, it seems, is to make space for this important experimental work in an academy whose hiring, promotion and tenure processes still strongly privilege traditional metrics of scholarly productivity. To rise to these occasions and to be persuasive DH advocates we need to model the healthy balance between, on the one hand, an enterprising spirit of investment and open inquiry, and on the other, the skeptical rigor and critical distance that attend all humanistic projects and to which the work of the humanities scholars we want to reach is constantly subject. I felt that the workshop in Marburg laid a very solid foundation for further development of just this kind of energetic, open, and rigorous approach to the field of digital scholarship. I very much hope this was the beginning of a long-term transatlantic collaboration that will generate constructive responses to the challenges and opportunities digital technologies pose for humanities research.

by Aaron Shkuda (Project manager of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton)

The week-long “Digitally Mapping Eastern Europe” workshop brought to the forefront a question I’ve been asking myself for several years: how do the longstanding visualization practices in urban studies fit with current digital methods in the humanities? What can mapping tell us (or fail to capture) about urban life?

As an urban historian, nearly every class I teach introduces the “concentric zones” map developed by University of Chicago sociologists Ernest Burgess and Robert Park in their 1925 work The City. This visualization depicts Chicago as a series of rings, from the Loop at its center to the commuter zone of single-family homes at the edges. Park and Burgess postulated that cities grow by a process of invasion and succession, with people and businesses moving out of the more congested areas of the inner city towards the open land, peaceful neighborhoods, and less-intense land usages of the outer rings.

Like today’s digital mapping projects, Park and Burgess used the data that they collected by visiting Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods as the basis for a visual model that sought to explain the dynamics of city life. This model makes intuitive sense – central business districts expand when businesses move into neighboring areas due to high land prices. It’s a goal of many residents to move out of a smaller house in a crowded neighborhood to a more affluent area of single-family homes

Yet nearly 100 years later, the map Park and Burgess produced based on the best data processing tools of their day seems hopelessly out of date. Anyone who looks at a city map can tell you that 1) neighborhoods rarely resemble circles; 2) American cities do not always grow; and 3) nothing in Park and Burgess’ model resembles an actual city. What remains relevant, however, is the theory behind the map – the idea that residents from one neighborhood tend to “invade” the next, and in doing so fundamentally change its character. It was this notion that inspired the redlining maps of the 1930s, and (consciously or not) inspired white residents in the U.S. to react violently to attempts by people of color to integrate their neighborhoods. We now see this process of invasion and succession taking place in reverse, with affluent white residents “rediscovering” inner-city neighborhoods and pricing out long-term residents through a process of gentrification.

Invasion and succession can be mapped, and digital tools are helpful in this regard. In my Princeton course Mapping Gentrification, I ask students to turn their observations of urban life into data points that can be placed on a street grid using ArcGIS. They learn to download government data on topics including education, race, income, and housing prices to visualize neighborhood change. Comparing these two items – on-the-ground observations with publicly available data – can produce a compelling portrait of urban life. To site one example, looking at where new coffee shops or art galleries locate compared to where housing prices are rising fastest can allow students to explore how consumption patterns and real estate value function in tandem to shape gentrification.

Yet in these projects, and in all urban maps dating back to Park and Burgess and beyond, what is most interesting is often not on the map. The backroom deal that allowed a developer to skirt zoning regulations and cause an area to become wealthier, whiter, or more educated, may only turn a square census tract on a GIS map a slightly darker shade of red. A single geocoded point representing a gallery does not encapsulate the risk that artists may have taken to open the space, and this single point does not represent the creative networks that sustained them in doing so.

As “Digitally Mapping Eastern Europe” keynote speaker Katharina Lorenz reminded us, the best maps allow us to ask better questions. They are the starting points for further research, and most often point us back to the original sources that provided the data for our maps. In the end, a week of thinking of maps returned me to the question of why we map and how mapping as a methodology can be used be conjunction with (and not as a replacement of) longstanding research practices in the humanities.