Below is the presentation and talking points for a session I chaired at the 2013 annual Society of American Archivists Conference in New Orleans: Collaboration and Community: 3 Digital Humanities Projects
Slide 1
Good morning! I’m excited to share with the details of a current collaborative project that we’re working on at the University of Rochester. The Seward Family Editorial Project is a team based project that one of our History faculty members, Professor Tom Slaughter is directing.
In addition to the involvement of staff in Special Collections, there are also library staff members participating from the Digital Humanities Center and students- both undergraduates and grads. The project seeks to digitize items from the William Henry Seward Papers that are housed at the University.
The Seward papers is one of the most consulted manuscript collections in the University’s holdings. There are over 100,000 items in the Seward Collection, including letters, photographs and ledgers. Seward served as New York State’s Senator and Governor and after losing the 1860 Republican Presidential nomination to Lincoln, he served as President Lincoln’s Secretary of State.
Slide 2
This project has compelled me to rethink how we as archivists work on Digital Humanities projects and how we conceive of the question of ownership and trust.
I view this project as a triangle of collaboration. As the curator of the Seward papers, I work with the students and Professor Slaughter to provide access to the materials for them to scan and transcribe. The staff in the Digital Humanities center facilitates our understanding of scholarly editing practice and is working with a Technology sub group of project participants to build the website.
If I have learned nothing else this past year, collaboration is messy! Most of the time I take comfort in that ambiguity, but there are the occasional moments, when I am compelled to ask: Whose project is this, or who owns this and can make the final decision???
Although the collection lives in Special Collections, I am not the project director, Professor Slaughter is. While Nora, the head of the Digital Humanities Center, and I participate in the decision making, ultimately Professor Slaughter choses our direction. Complicating matters further, the project uses staff time, library funds in addition to outside sources, and library equipment and spaces.
Slide 3
The project began as a class in the fall of 2012. As we prepared for the semester, we began talking about which part of the 100,000 item collection the students would work with we decided to focus on the personal and not the political papers in the collection.
We decided because of the sesqui-centennial of the Civil War that we would focus the class on the letters exchanged by Seward family members during this conflict.
So when the class began last fall the students not only met and got to know us and each other but they became drawn into the Seward family.
We embarked on this team teaching adventure thinking this would be a 1 semester experiment. The class met 3 times a week. On Mondays I taught the class and worked with the students to help them understand how to handle manuscripts and to help them decipher the often tricky 19th century handwriting.
The class was made of up 5 undergraduates and 5 graduate students. The students were not just history majors; four of them were in a film master’s program. The undergraduates included 1 Computer Science major and one non-traditional student.
On Wednesday’s my colleague, in the Digital Humanities Center worked with the class to help them make decisions that would inform the TEI, or the Text Encoding Initiative, mark- up that will bring this project into the league of the Blake Archive and others.
On Fridays the class met in a History seminar room and stepped back from the individual lives of the family members to analyze events during the time in which they exchanged letters.
Slide 4
Because the class was an experiment in that manuscripts were driving course content as never before, we felt freer to experiment with other parts of the course as well.
From the beginning each undergraduate was paired with a graduate student to work through the materials. This peer to peer learning experience further changed my thinking about ownership of the project.
Unlike a traditional class with a set syllabus that remains relatively the same each semester, with the Seward class the students felt tremendous pride that the decisions they made- whether the decision was about the layout of the website, or the way letters would be annotated, or which secondary sources future students enrolled in the class would read-
All of their decisions would be taken seriously and it was their decisions, in concert with Professor Slaughter’s vision that drove our decision making throughout this past year.
It was an incredible experience to see the students become more comfortable with the manuscripts and with each other, with each passing week.
At the end of the fall semester, Professor Slaughter decided to expand our one semester experiment into a 6 year project at the end of which there will be a website with over 6,000 letters exchanged between the family members beginning in the 1830s- 1870s.
Slide 5
Although we’ve been experimenting with numerous text encoding software this past year, our basic workflow remains the same. The student works with the original letter in class and types out the transcription that you see on the right.
Slide 6
One of the goals of the class is to give students hands on experience working with manuscripts, but also to offer students, especially graduate students a glimpse into alternative career paths. Learning skills that drive the Digital Humanities discipline is an important component of the project.
Once a batch of letters has been transcribed, a smaller group of students then work to mark up the letter using TEI.
Slide 7
One of the major issues we encountered time and again with this project was providing access to the materials. Last fall each student had a folder with his or her name on it and the folder was “check out” and “checked in” before and after every class to ensure that all of the letters were accounted for.
We also encouraged students to use the letters in our reading room and so they filled out our registration form and we reviewed with them the rules of the reading room. All of the letters were also available on a non-public website, so students could continue to do their work beyond our 9-5 hours.
Due to the small number of students in the class, we were able to establish a high level of trust by the end of the fall 2012 semester. The students understood the importance of handling the letters with care and adhering to security policies, as Professor Slaughter had made it clear that these policies and procedures protected all of us.
Beginning in January, we talked about expanding students’ access to the letters. 7 students continued working on the project during the spring through independent studies and didn’t meet as a formal class, as they had in the fall. It soon became clear that having staff bring their letters out to them, as we would for other researchers, placed too much of a burden on our staff.
Professor Slaughter and I discussed our options for providing students with more access to the materials, while decreasing the burden on staff time and making sure the materials were in a secure environment.
We placed all of the manuscripts, about 5 boxes, in one carrel in the reading room and laptops for the students to use in the second carrel. Both carrels were left unlocked and students signed into the reading room, as all researchers do, and then had complete access to their materials without staff to facilitate their use.
Although we thought that our other patrons would voice complaints about the unequal treatment, none did.
Slide 8
We continued to use the carrels into May as the project received funds from both the library and an alumna of the History Department to hire interns for the summer to continue transcribing and scanning the letters.
But as you can see, we soon experienced growing pains and had to find a new solution. Our reading room was reaching capacity everyday between the 4 or 5 project students and additional researchers.
Slide 9
Space had become available in the library adjacent to our Special Collections department. It already had the scanning equipment and computers that the project participants would need.
Moving the project into this space, outside of the security and footprint of the Special Collections department would not be possible if we had not established a high level of trust among project participants. By the time the project moved into its new space, we had been working with the same students for 8 months.
Slide 10
It’s been wonderful this summer to have dedicated space for the students to work on this project.
In order to get into the project office, students enter a personal code on a key pad, which also tracks their comings and goings. The key pad enables us to restrict access to 9-5, helping us to balance security concerns.
Students use a copy stand to photograph the letters in the first room of this space, and in the connected room, the space is now set up for the students and Professor Slaughter to work on encoding the letters and transcribing new ones.
The final change we made this summer was to allow students access to our stacks to pull more materials. I trained them how to indicate which boxes they’ve taken into the project space and how to indicate what boxes they’ve brought back.
Two new students began working on the project in July and they don’t enjoy the same privileges as those students who we began working with last September. The ebb and flow of trust and access has been a constant this past year.
Slide 11
As you can imagine, this past year has stretched my thinking about what my role as an archivist really means.
I’ve been and will continue to be a consultant, as I bring my knowledge about the collection and archival practice to the project.
I still work to balance security needs with access to the collection.
I have also begun to think more about building a community archive, or encouraging students to participate in editing and enhancing the finding aid to the Seward Papers, as they continue to dig deeper into this material more than I ever could spend the time doing.
My experience this year has shown me that we, as archivists have the opportunity through collaborative projects to be SUPER HEROES. We may be moving into unfamiliar territory, but our central mission- to connect our collections with the curriculum and the undergraduate experience- remains a constant.
As we continue to imagine how we might breathe new life into our collections with engaged partners and stakeholders, we can develop this scholarly content together and further open our doors and our collections to new users.