The Joseph Mathia Diaries Project, part of the Newbook Digital Text Project, is a research initiative started in 2012 and dedicated to the application of innovative digital technologies towards the multi-media publication of 16 original diaries and 30 transcriptions of Joseph Mathia Svoboda's original diaries. The transformation of these primary sources into physical or digital media consists of five phases: transcribing, editing, analyzing, encoding and formatting each text; with each and every one of them characterized as needing of extensive human resources. These resources come in form of undergraduate and graduate student interns; the undergraduate community being the most represented. The project almost entirely depends on this segment of the student body due to reduced funding but most importantly because we strongly believe that, by empowering our interns to assume positions of responsibility in lower and mid-level management and to participate in cross-function collaboration within the five phases of the project, we provide our students with invaluable experiences that prepare them for future successful professional and academic endeavors. Through interviews, surveys and other internal forms of evaluation, this research project aims to understand the process through which students get involved with the Newbook Digital Text Project, the nature of their work, the relation and relevance of this work to their area of study or interests and the outcome of this research internship in terms of skills and experience gained from becoming involved with undergraduate research. Consequently, this research project aims to demonstrate to the university community the high level of innovation, impact and collaboration the undergraduate student community can bring into traditional scholarly research.

In the humanities, histories of technology generally examine objects through representations, such as patents, illustrations, fictions, and newspapers. With objects flattened on the page, this approach rarely attends to how technologies worked in context and over time. In response, we prototyped a series of early technologies, which cannot be immediately accessed in museums or archives; they have been lost, destroyed, or broken, yet they deeply inform present day devices. In this talk, we present three of our prototypes: an early wearable technology, an early wire recorder, and an early reading machine. The early wearable prototype features a skull cravat-pin (designed by Gustave Trouvé and Auguste-Germain Cadet Picard in 1867), which was said to snap its jaw and roll its eyes. We replicated the mechanism of the skull using electromagnetic technologies available in the nineteenth century. We found that the size of the skull, as described in historical records, could not have contained the electromagnet necessary to propel the skull’s jaw. This suggests that textual representations of the stick-pin were distorted by Victorian hyperbole. Elsewhere, our wire recorder prototype recreates a precursor to data storage: Valdemar Poulsen’s 1898 experiments with sound, whereby people yelled into a transmitter while running a trolley along a wire. Despite its claims for high fidelity, our findings suggest this process was highly contingent on the bodies and movements of users. Finally, the reading machine prototype explores the maintenance of Fournier d’Albe’s 1913 optophone, which translated images into sound, by one of its blind users, Mary Jameson. Early results of this research stress that Jameson contributed significantly to the optophone’s development, even if she is never mentioned in patents and rarely in other textual accounts. Together, these prototypes highlight why trial-and-error experimentation (as a method for humanities research) matters for historical inquiry into technology off the page.

In the late 1920s, geologist J Harlen Bretz proposed that a catastrophic flood - larger than any in human history - had carved the Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington State. Established geologists rejected this theory as impossible and repeatedly attempted to discredit and deny his work. Undeterred, Bretz continued to research the Channeled Scablands and ultimately wrote 15 comprehensive academic papers on the subject. His megaflood theory did not see wide acceptance until the 1960s. Modern writings about J Harlen Bretz all tell the same story; he was a rebel protagonist with an outrageous theory who was vehemently opposed by his fellow geologists until vindication finally arrived after 40 years. But where did this story come from? Bretz's history has been recorded through academic papers, biographies, newspaper articles, and popular sources online. I use the language of these varied sources to explain how the perception of J Harlen Bretz changed from heretic to hero over the course of 40 years. The evolution of Bretz's legacy highlights that the process of science is not always as rational, dispassionate, and removed from human emotion as we would prefer to believe. It is a case study for the role of human nature in scientific pursuit.

 As millionaire art collector turned excavator Theodore M. Davis’s mistress, Emma B. Andrews documented significant archaeological excavations during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptian archaeology at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Within her journals, Emma detailed annual voyages along the Nile for more than two decades, providing important contemporary insights into Egyptian society.  The goals of our Diary Project include the digitization and publication of diary content along with wide-ranging biographical and historical research. To date, student interns have transcribed all 19 volumes of the original diaries. This year we have focused on completing structural markup to prepare the texts for online publication.  Our historical research has been wide-ranging, bringing to light many contemporary images of family, friends, fellow travelers, archaeological sites and Nile travel. However, we have not yet discovered a clear photograph of Emma herself.  Although she was the daughter of a prominent Ohio family, and a nexus of archaeological and social activity in Egypt, her controversial affair with Theodore Davis may have caused her family to destroy documents and photographs after her death in 1922. Using digital tools and methodologies, our intention is to use the information we have gathered programmatically from the diaries as the basis for creating an artist’s sketch of Emma Andrews.  We have customized a generic Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) tagset to create a new ‘trait’ tag enabling us to document physical characteristics and automatically compile them in a database.  We will be incorporating similar details mined from related contemporary diaries and correspondence that reference Emma. We are completing a pictorial analysis of close family members along with further written descriptions we have identified to facilitate the recreation of our ‘invisible diarist’. Our proposal melds digital technology, traditional humanities research and an imaginative recreation of the past.

This presentation examines the architectural design of the Jefferson County Museum of Art and History in Port Townsend, Washington. It address how the industrial boom of the 1890's shaped the city’s architectural environment and we look at how the building functioned within the community. With the use of historical photographs, first hand accounts and economic know-how, I seek to examine the environment that built this impressive structure only to leave it to crumble a few decades later. After falling into disrepair in the forties, the building in question was decapitated, leaving an incomplete image of a time bygone. Square pseudo-classical columns with sandstone Corinthian capitals add a touch of grace to its current stout silhouette, but it was meant to be so much more. This elegant imagery signifies what Port Townsend was intended to be: a vibrant port town in competition with Seattle. I seek to compare the Romanesque façade of the Jefferson County Museum of Art and History to the similarly styled Pioneer building in downtown Seattle, Washington. I discuss how the similarities in architectural choice reflect their competitive status for primary port town in the region and the cultural legacies they represent. By looking at the consequences of drastic spending in an inflated economy, I hope to look towards the future by recognizing the posthumous signs of economic collapse and how this past applies to our future.

My project’s source is an unpublished journal in Arabic written by Alexander Svoboda, a young Baghdadi from an originally European family who traveled from Baghdad to Europe in 1897. Svoboda describes his visits to historical sites in Iraq and Syria, many of which are now threatened with partial or complete destruction. Threats to these sites include assaults and theft by parties such as ISIS. Through such activities, the group strives to obliterate the cultural genome of their alleged enemies. My project highlights the urgency of protecting and preserving the cultural heritage of this region. My research employs three open source digital tools: StoryMap JS, StoryMap Gigapixel, and Simile Widget. StoryMap JS displays an interactive map that tracks and visualizes Svoboda’s journey in chronological order. This tool is supplemented by contextual information about each city taken from the original diary with images of the cultural artifacts in each location. The tool contains own user interface and functionality, but I will customize the appearance of my work by adapting elements of the source code. Images are displayed using StoryMap Gigapixel, which lends visual depth and encourages user engagement with stories created in StoryMap JS. By comparing 19th-century images of cultural centers with modern photographs, the tool enables a virtual tour of an object or place—then and now, with details of the minutest features. This comparison of varying perspectives and details reveals patterns of attrition and loss. I supplement these maps and images using an interactive timeline tool, Simile Widget which displays dates of creation and destruction of culturally significant sites and visualizes the duration of endangerment. The display is explorable by site or date and contains brief historical summaries with links to relevant articles and videos. This kind of hands-on engagement with history can be a significant awareness-raising tool.