(3837,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','In 2008 Tom Smith took a practicum course called The Power of Place, taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss through the <a href=\"http://krieger.jhu.edu/africana\">Center for Africana Studies</a>. The students recorded oral histories of residents of Baltimore\'s Middle East neighborhood for the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH), which they later assembled into a <a href=\"http://eboh.jhu.edu/oralhistoryplayer/\">digital audio archive</a>. The course led Smith to think about how to integrate the recordings with their lengthy transcripts. In addition to the interviews he conducted for the class, Smith eventually built the player software featured on the project website. The software that he developed is open source, so anyone can use it without having to pay license or royalty fees. Smith’s company, ESDA LLC, can implement the software on a contract basis for those without the expertise to do it in-house.\n\n<a href=\"http://morgue.afro.com/AfroArchon/\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1253\" title=\"jhu_project photo_afro\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_project-photo_afro.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"638\" height=\"425\" /></a> <span class=\"caption\" style=\"margin-bottom: 30px;\">Unprocessed boxes of archival material, Baltimore <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em>, 2008.</span>\n\nSmith’s research on practical archival problems brought him into contact with Moira Hinderer, the project manager for the <a href=\"http://magazine.jhu.edu/2011/11/unboxing-history/\">Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project</a> (DPAAP), a partnership between the Baltimore <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> and Johns Hopkins University. DPAAP focuses on organizing and preserving the archives of the <em>Afro-American Newspapers;</em> they have worked on the newspapers’ <a href=\"http://morgue.afro.com/AfroArchon/\">morgue collections</a> as well as personal papers and institutional records. Hinderer, who is also a lecturer in the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins, teaches classes in which students work directly with the <em>Afro</em>’s archives. Smith watched Hinderer\'s students and archival interns involved in the painstaking labor of flatbed scanning and wondered if this process could be made more efficient. The time and expense involved in the digitization of delicate archival materials at the <em>Afro</em> prompted Smith to invent another tool: the <a href=\"http://projectgado.org/\">Gado scanner</a>.','Afro - Project Description','','inherit','open','open','','1064-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','',1064,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1064-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3838,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1247\" title=\"jhu_teacher photo_hinderer\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_teacher-photo_hinderer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />Over the last four years, I have worked as a lecturer teaching courses about Baltimore and African American history, and I have also served as the project manager for the Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project (DPAAP), a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These experiences have shown me that students learn best when they are not simply taught history, but when they also act as historians. Baltimore offers both possibilities and challenges for students doing historical projects. Much of the city’s history remains unwritten, and historical materials are often tucked away in small archives and private homes. Records that are not easily accessible present a special problem for students who are constrained by time and transportation. Both the East Baltimore Oral History Project and the <em>Afro</em> Archives partnership seek to address these challenges by involving students in the process of uncovering, describing, and making accessible historical records, and then encouraging students to use these resources for historical research.\n\nThe East Baltimore Oral History Project involves students in the work of preserving the memories of established members of the East Baltimore community. For students, this work addresses a major complaint about life as a Johns Hopkins undergraduate: they are too removed from the life of the city, and they are not encouraged to interact with the city and its inhabitants in meaningful ways. The interviewing process has the additional benefit of making students experts, allowing them to bring a substantive point of view and body of evidence as they critique course readings and engage in class discussions. As interviews are added to the project website, students produce an accessible community history resource that will last well beyond the usual semester-long class project.\n\nDPAAP also depends heavily on the work of student archival interns, and on the technical skills of the current and former students who form the Project Gado team, led by recent Johns Hopkins University graduate Tom Smith. Archival interns have been involved in every step of uncovering the archives, from labeling boxes and shelves, to entering information into our archival database, to writing essays for our database website. This work has given interns a perspective on African American history usually reserved for history professionals. With materials pertaining to almost every local, national, and international aspect of Black history, interns are often asked to describe the central themes and narratives of this diverse archive. This challenge requires them to address the problem of twentieth-century information overload familiar to both historians and archivists. The Project Gado team offers a different set of solutions to the problem of preserving and making accessible vast amounts of archival materials. The members of Project Gado are involved in innovative work in the digital humanities as they create low-cost options for large-scale digitization. The work of Tom Smith and Project Gado suggests another possibility for hands-on coursework in history, courses that would integrate technical skills and the creation of hardware and software into a rigorous humanities education to prepare students to be twenty-first-century humanities scholars.','Moira Hinderer - Commentary','Over the last four years, I have worked as a lecturer teaching courses about Baltimore and African American history, and I have also served as the project manager for the Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project (DPAAP), a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the Afro-American Newspapers funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These experiences have shown me that students learn best when they are not simply taught history, but when they also act as historians. Baltimore offers both possibilities and challenges for students doing historical projects. Much of the city’s history remains unwritten, and historical materials are often tucked away in small archives and private homes. Records that are not easily accessible present a special problem for students who are constrained by time and transportation. Both the East Baltimore Oral History Project and the Afro Archives partnership seek to address these challenges by involving students in the process of uncovering, describing, and making accessible historical records, and then encouraging students to use these resources for historical research. ','inherit','open','open','','1062-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','',1062,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1062-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3839,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1244\" title=\"jhu_student photo_smith\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_student-photo_smith.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />When people think of Johns Hopkins University they think of medicine, and rightly so. JHU prepares people for medical school better than any college in the world. The medical attitude, however, extends beyond the bounded world of pre-meds. Hopkins often values the reductionism of the scientific method and the cleanliness of the lab over holism and real-world, big-picture thinking. In looking for classes during my sophomore year at JHU, then, I was surprised to find The Power of Place taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss. The course was a practicum, and all participants would conduct oral histories as part of the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH). This was a rare chance to get out of the infamous “Hopkins Bubble.” I signed up.\n\nDuring Power of Place I helped produce several oral histories. As interviews flowed in, however, I began to see a problem. Each interview was around two hours long and included a full transcript. From my class alone, the project would amass nearly thirty hours of audio and several hundred pages of text. Making use of those materials would be tough. As a software developer, I saw a solution. I imagined a tool that could link transcripts with audio, allow people to tag important areas within interviews, and make all the EBOH materials searchable. With support from the university, I spent the next year working with Professor Shell-Weiss to make my idea into a working web application.\n\nWhile working on EBOH, I started visiting archives. I could find few digital images of East Baltimore, and I wanted to know why. On a trip to the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> with Moira Hinderer, I found a plethora of visual materials. Very few, however, had been digitized. The main factor was cost; resources to manually digitize the <em>Afro</em> collection simply were not available. Again, I saw a technical solution: I would build a robot. I proposed creating an automatic scanner that could lift and digitize the <em>Afro</em>’s sensitive artifacts, all for less than $500. No one at JHU thought it would happen. Luckily, Professor Shell-Weiss managed to raise some funds, and I spent a summer prototyping. The result was the Gado 1, a proof-of-concept that would later scan over 1,000 images at the <em>Afro</em>. The price tag was $496.\n\nAfter graduating from JHU in May 2011, I wanted to continue refining my technology. With support from the JHU Sheridan Libraries and the Abell Foundation (a regional grantsmaker), I secured enough funding to work on my project full time. In December 2011, I completed the Gado 2, a second-generation machine that dramatically outpaces the original. Since testing began, my machine has digitized over 3,000 artifacts at the <em>Afro</em>, at a tiny fraction of the cost of manual scanning. In February 2012, we made these images available to the general public and launched GadoImages.com to distribute them to paying licensors. I believe Gado has the potential to dramatically alter the economics of archival digitization. I would never be at this point without that first push to step outside the classroom and start thinking in broader terms.','Tom Smith - Commentary','When people think of Johns Hopkins University they think of medicine, and rightly so. JHU prepares people for medical school better than any college in the world. The medical attitude, however, extends beyond the bounded world of pre-meds. Hopkins often values the reductionism of the scientific method and the cleanliness of the lab over holism and real-world, big-picture thinking. In looking for classes during my sophomore year at JHU, then, I was surprised to find The Power of Place taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss. The course was a practicum, and all participants would conduct oral histories as part of the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH). This was a rare chance to get out of the infamous “Hopkins Bubble.” I signed up.','inherit','open','open','','1059-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','',1059,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1059-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3840,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','<h4>The student work for this case study is two archival tools designed by Tom Smith:  a low-cost robotic scanner for paper-based materials and a web application for an oral history archive.  Click on the images below to learn more about these tools.</h4>\n<a href=\"http://projectgado.org/\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1258\" title=\"jhu_student project photo 1_gado\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_student-project-photo-1_gado.jpg\" alt=\"The Gado 2 Robotic Scanner scanning photos at the Afro-American Newspapers archive.\" width=\"638\" height=\"478\" /></a> <span class=\"caption\">The Gado 2 Robotic Scanner scanning photos at the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> archive.</span>\n\n<a href=\"http://eboh.jhu.edu/oralhistoryplayer\"><img class=\" wp-image-2451\" style=\"margin-top: 30px;\" title=\"jhu_student project photo 2_eboh\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/jhu_student-project-photo-2_eboh.jpg\" alt=\"The East Baltimore Oral History Player showing the index entry for a resident whose story Tom Smith helped to document and record.\" width=\"630\" /></a> <span class=\"caption\">The East Baltimore Oral History Player showing the index entry for a resident whose story Tom Smith helped to document and record.</span>','Student-Built Archival Tools','This case study focuses on a student who contributed much more than expected to digital projects by creating two archival tools: a web application for an oral history archive and a low-cost robotic scanner for paper-based materials. In a practicum course at Johns Hopkins University, Tom Smith and his peers worked on recording and organizing oral histories. Smith also developed an audio player for the digital archive. This work brought him in contact with the <a href=\"http://archive.magazine.jhu.edu/2011/11/unboxing-history\">Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project</a> (DPAAP) and led Smith to invent another tool: the <a href=\"http://projectgado.org/\">Gado scanner</a>. This powerful, durable robotic scanner digitizes sensitive archival materials and can be built using simple components for less than $500.','inherit','open','open','','1057-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','',1057,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1057-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3841,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','As an undergraduate English major with a concentration in creative writing, I had always regarded books as a portal into the world of fiction, a place where I could study plots and themes, setting and syntax. I had never stopped to consider books as historical objects until my first class in English 241: Archeology of Text. The assignment for the final research paper seemed simple: use what we learned during the semester to explore, analyze, and describe a document of interest from Goucher’s Special Collections.\n\nI knew from the start that I was intrigued by Goucher’s prolific collection of Jane Austen materials, but needed something specific to spark my interest. Walking around the small Special Collections room in the Julia Rogers Library, my gaze landed on a blue box behind a glass case. I soon learned that inside that box lay the first American edition of <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816).  Nancy Magnuson, college librarian, told me all about Alberta Burke’s letters and thought that they might contain clues for my research. I have always been fascinated with letters (both reading and writing them), and the process of tracking a specific book through personal correspondences captivated me. I chose to study the 1816 first American edition of <em>Emma</em> and explore the letters that track how it found a home in Goucher’s library.\n\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-1273\" title=\"goucher_student action photo_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-action-photo_kendall.jpg\" alt=\"Sarah Kendall working with the Burke copy of the American first edition of Austen\'s Emma\" width=\"320\" height=\"375\" />\n<span class=\"caption\" style=\"width: 320px\">Sarah Kendall working with the Burke copy of the American first edition of Austen\'s Emma (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells & Lilly, Boston, 1816) in the former Rare Book Collection Seminar Room (December 2007).</span>\n\nI remain baffled by the amount of information and detailed history I discovered while writing a descriptive bibliography. I wrote detailed accounts of the letters from Alberta Burke and David Gilson, the letters between David Gilson and Henry Burke, and the 1816 first edition of <em>Emma</em>. After seeing the interest that both Alberta Burke and David Gilson had in the first American edition of <em>Emma</em>, I knew that perusing the pages and studying the tome in detail would be essential to revealing the book’s history. Sifting through dozens of letters hoping to find mention of <em>Emma</em> thrilled me to no end. Reading different letters from various sources also illuminated how various people valued the first edition and why they wanted it in their possession. The circuit of corresponding materials proved equally intriguing and helpful for tracking down how the book traveled from Philadelphia to Goucher’s library.\n\nI learned that by latching on to a specific topic, I could follow a steady thread of conversation about <em>Emma</em>. The experience made me feel like a genuine historian instead of an undergraduate student simply researching journal articles or internet resources. It felt very special and intellectually stimulating to handle history with my own hands! I even discovered two additional letters hidden between the inside cover and the title page of the first volume. Unearthing these two letters felt very encouraging and proved that there is always the possibility of finding something new within the archives.','Sarah Kendall - Commentary','As an undergraduate English major with a concentration in creative writing, I had always regarded books as a portal into the world of fiction, a place where I could study plots and themes, setting and syntax. I had never stopped to consider books as historical objects until my first class in English 241: Archeology of Text. The assignment for the final research paper seemed simple: use what we learned during the semester to explore, analyze, and describe a document of interest from Goucher’s Special Collections.','inherit','open','open','','1053-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','',1053,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1053-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3842,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','When I heard about English 241: Archeology of Text, I was immediately excited. I had been working in Special Collections and Archives at Goucher College for about a year, and I knew the class would give me a chance to learn more about books and archives in a setting that would encourage discussions with my peers. When it came time to pick a collection for my final project, I decided to work with archival materials rather than books so that I could challenge myself.\n\nWhile working in Special Collections, I had often walked by large blue boxes containing scrapbooks, but I had yet to look through them. When I began leafing through them, I found that I learned as much about Goucher College as I did about the women who put the scrapbooks together. Many of the scrapbooks had things in common, including Valentines, pressed flowers, calling cards, and photographs. But what intrigued me most were the dance cards. I had never before encountered dance cards, or even heard of them, even though I had been dancing all my life. Many of the dance cards were from the U.S. Naval Academy, a nearby all-male school in need of women with whom to dance. Goucher girls would often travel to Annapolis for the weekend dances and bring back dance cards as souvenirs.\n\n<img class=\" wp-image-1275\" title=\"goucher_student action photo_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-action-photo_brand.jpg\" alt=\"Cassie Brand working in the former Rare Book Collection Seminar Room \" width=\"510\" height=\"382\" />\n<span class=\"caption\" style=\"width: 510px\">Cassie Brand working in the former Rare Book Collection Seminar Room (December 2007) with an early Chaucer edition from Special Collections (Ed. John Urry, London: Printed for Bernard Lintot, 1721). </span>\n\nWhen I began researching these cards, I found very little information. I went to all of the reference librarians I could find, but even they had difficulties because very few secondary sources were available. I looked through all the etiquette books I could get my hands on and even asked people to tell me what they knew about dance cards. Those who knew of them provided me with the basic information I needed to study the cards.\n\nI contacted the U.S. Naval Academy Archives, and with the help of Nancy Magnuson, Goucher College Librarian, I made an appointment to see their collection. There I found an almost complete run of dance cards from the Farewell Ball, which was held every year after graduation. Some were blank, some were filled in, some contained photographs, and some still had their tiny pencils attached. Looking through the cards, I found that they could be studied in several ways. One could examine print history, dance history, social history, or even one woman’s history of dance partners. The first and last dance cards were so drastically different that I chose to look at how the cards changed over the years. I found that the cards’ modifications reflected the changes in social dances.\n\nThough I have not yet returned to the dance card collections to study them further, they have never been far from my mind. I am still trying to convince people that dance cards are brilliant and should be reinstated for social events. Dance cards remain an interest of mine, and I would love to eventually write their complete history.','Cassie Brand - Commentary','When I heard about English 241: Archeology of Text, I was immediately excited. I had been working in Special Collections and Archives at Goucher College for about a year, and I knew the class would give me a chance to learn more about books and archives in a setting that would encourage discussions with my peers. When it came time to pick a collection for my final project, I decided to work with archival materials rather than books so that I could challenge myself.','inherit','open','open','','1051-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','',1051,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1051-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3843,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1279\" title=\"goucher_instructor image_sanders\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_instructor-image_sanders.jpg\" alt=\"Sanders\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />Students prepare for English 241: Archeology of Text research projects in twelve weeks of readings and laboratory experiences, which introduce the skills necessary to work with early printed books and archival documents. (For the text of the assignment, see <a href=\"http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng241/241_individual_research_projects_F09.htm\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>). The goal of these projects is to enable each student to pursue a self-designed creative or descriptive study of books, manuscripts, and other artifacts from Special Collections and Archives. Because the course is interdisciplinary and students come from many majors, it is hard to predict where students’ curiosities will take them. The best way to encourage active student engagement is to prepare students for the widest range of book- and document-related work. Successful projects can lead to further research supported by Goucher’s Peirce Center fellowships.\n\nBeginning with the study of how a digital document is constructed and the history of the Internet’s “cloud” library, students practice searching online scholarly sites such as the <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em> (OED), WorldCat, <em>English Short-Title Catalog</em> (ESTC), and the continental library collections accessible through the University of Karlsruhe’s online catalog. They also explore using search engines and databases to identify and locate people, places, and things. Those skills provide interpretive context for hand-press books in the course’s next segment. After three weeks of studying typography, format, bindings, and hand-made paper and its manufacture, students have learned the most basic descriptive bibliography skills. This enables them to describe the edition-specific and copy-specific details of their “cadaver books,” a set of early printed books they handle each week to encourage safe and intelligent treatment of early paper and bindings. Finally, paper and parchment manuscript laboratories teach students to decipher secretary and scribal hands from the nineteenth through the thirteenth centuries. This enables them to interpret marginalia in early printed books, including owners’ inscriptions and other provenance and use evidence.\n\nSarah Kendall’s study of the Burke Austen Collection’s copy of the two-volume American first edition of Jane Austen’s <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816) represents a creative response to traditional rare-book provenance study, resulting in her discovery of a significant trove of correspondence in the book’s archival container. Before Alberta Burke brought the book to Baltimore, it had passed through the hands of Christina Broun Dalhousie (the Countess Dalhousie); a prominent collector, Frank J. Hogan; and a poet, Siegfried Sassoon. Kendall’s study demonstrates the way a book’s value changes as it moves from owner to owner, becoming as attractive for its associations and rarity as it is for its text. An archives-based approach to using the course’s analytical tools is represented by Cassie Brand’s study of U.S. Naval Academy dance cards found in the scrapbook kept by Goucher student Mary Lee Keith (Class of 1924), augmented by research at The Nimitz Library in Annapolis. Brand showed how the cards could be used to study crucial changes in American courtship conventions as women took control of their relations with potential suitors.\n\nThese two projects represent the course’s goal: to enable original, undergraduate, hands-on archival research using interdisciplinary skills:\n<ul>\n	<li>See images from <a href=\"http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng241/cassie_brand_IRP_imaging_Fall%202007.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Brand’s dance card project</a>.</li>\n	<li>See a portfolio of images of the <a href=\"http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng241/English_241_IRP_Images_F07.htm\" target=\"_blank\">2007 class researching final projects</a>.</li>\n</ul>','Arnold Sanders - Commentary','Students prepare for English 241, “Archeology of Text,” research projects in twelve weeks of readings and laboratory experiences which introduce skills necessary to work with early printed books and archival documents. The goal of these projects is to enable each student to pursue a self-designed creative or descriptive study of books, manuscripts, and other artifacts from Special Collections and Archives. Because the course is interdisciplinary and students come from many majors, it is hard to predict where students’ curiosities will take them. The best way to encourage active student engagement is prepare students for the widest range of book and document related work. Successful projects can lead to further research supported by Goucher’s Peirce Center fellowships.','inherit','open','open','','1049-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','',1049,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1049-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3844,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','','Hands-On Research with Rare Books and Ephemera ','This case study features work that two students completed in an English class at Goucher College. The course, The Archeology of Text, offers students an understanding of the social and historical frameworks for the production and consumption of text, beginning with the digital age and moving backwards in time. Students are also trained in bibliographic research skills, which they apply to objects in Goucher’s Special Collections library. These objects then become the subjects of a research paper that serves as the final course project.','inherit','open','open','','1047-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:55:41','2013-04-18 20:55:41','',1047,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1047-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3845,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','<div id=\"map3d_devos\"></div>\n<div class=\"small light\">Installed Plugin Version: <span id=\"installed-plugin-version\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Loading...</span></div>','Walters - Beaupre Devos Live','','inherit','open','open','','1200-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','',1200,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1200-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3846,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','<img class=\"size-full wp-image-1185\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/walters_student-action-photo_dowdle.jpg\" alt=\"Elizabeth Dowdle (in striped shirt) with Capitoline Amazon, marble\" width=\"640\" height=\"426\" /> <span class=\"caption\">Elizabeth Dowdle (in striped shirt) and co-instructor Ben Tilghman (kneeling at right) with Capitoline Amazon, marble (Roman copy after Kresilas, Greek, active ca. 450 BC - 420 BC). Photo: Will Kirk, <a href=\"http://homewoodphoto.jhu.edu\">homewoodphoto.jhu.edu</a>.</span>\n\n<strong>1. Describe the sorts of work you did in developing your Google Earth presentation on this object. (You might consider both the unique forms of research involved and modes/methods of interpretation.)</strong>\nMy research focused on discovering the provenance of the Walters’ Capitoline Amazon, a Roman copy of a Greek bronze sculpture. Though the beautiful marble immediately caught my attention, I was surprised to find how little the museum actually knew about the object’s history. In order to unravel the mystery surrounding the sculpture, I looked for similar examples of sculpture in other museum collections and, consulting the records that came with them, began to piece together a tentative history of this ancient artwork.\n\n<strong>2. What did you learn from this project that distinguished it from other academic courses?</strong>\nThis project was unique in that I was provided with an ending point in the Walters gallery, but lacked a starting point for my research. This issue forced me to think outside the box and look for new ways to come up with the information I needed to draw out this object’s provenance. This called for more than an average trip to the library; I had to consult other institutions with similar sculptures in their collections and find possible answers to my questions based on the records they had on their pieces. It was a unique challenge, but this project truly taught me that where there is a will, there is a way.\n\n<strong>3. What was it like to create a final project that would be presented to the public?</strong>\nIt was both exciting and inspiring to create a project that would be presented to the public. Knowing that my work would be recognized outside the classroom inspired me to design a product that would make a difference not only for the Walters, but also for anyone looking for information about the Capitoline Amazon. I was driven to deliver a professional, museum-quality presentation that the Walters would be proud to add to their website.\n\n<strong>4. What did you learn from working in a professional museum and in conjunction with its staff?</strong>\nIt is always a privilege to work with professionals in the field you aspire to join, especially when you get to do so in the museum itself. Working with the staff at the Walters gave me insight into the everyday activities of registrars, curators, and collections managers as well as the challenges they face when caring for their collections and working to further their institutions’ missions. Especially in collections containing antiquities, it is not uncommon to come across objects with questionable histories. My time at the Walters taught me that it is of the utmost importance to authenticate the contents of your collection by making their unique histories known, despite the challenges this task might pose.\n\n<strong>5. What did this course/project and the opportunity to work with museum objects and their archival records mean to your education? your future plans? your general interests?</strong>\nThis course and the project I produced solidified my desire to pursue a career in museums. The opportunity to work with museum objects and their records has inspired me to continue my education so that I can also work in an institution dedicated to the preservation of culture for future generations. I graduated from Johns Hopkins University in May 2011 with a degree in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology and am now pursuing a master’s degree in Museum Studies at George Washington University, with a focus in museum administration and classical studies.','Elizabeth Dowdle - Commentary','My research focused on discovering the provenance of the Walters’ Capitoline Amazon, a Roman copy of a Greek bronze sculpture. Though the beautiful marble immediately caught my attention, I was surprised to find how little the museum actually knew about the object’s history. In order to unravel the mystery surrounding the sculpture, I looked for similar examples of sculpture in other museum collections and, consulting the records that came with them, began to piece together a tentative history of this ancient artwork.','inherit','open','open','','1152-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','',1152,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1152-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3847,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','<span class=\"alignright wp-caption-text\" style=\"width: 166px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1220\" style=\"margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"Elizabeth Rodini\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/rodini.jpg\" alt=\"Elizabeth Rodini\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" /> Photo: Will Kirk, <a href=\"http://homewoodphoto.jhu.edu\">homewoodphoto.jhu.edu</a></span>Material Migrations, like many of the practicum courses offered in the Program in Museums and Society (M&amp;S), gave students the chance to engage directly with objects, conduct research in and around those materials, and, most distinctively, develop a final project to be shared with a general audience—in this case, Google Earth “tours” of object provenance histories, to be incorporated into the website of the Walters Art Museum. M&amp;S practicum projects take the form of exhibitions, both actual and virtual; interpretative materials, such as audio tours, gallery guides, and websites; and program development. I like to think of them as works of “public humanities,” sharing the research we do in the university with a larger audience.\n\nWhy bother with such an exercise? The answer Ben Tilghman and I provided in our syllabus for this course: “To share what we are learning with the public. This is a fundamental task of museums. . . <em>in this course we extend that mission to the undergraduate classroom.</em>” Universities suffer from being removed from the broader community, while humanistic disciplines without clear “practical” applications are particularly at risk from this sort of isolation and perceived irrelevance. On the other hand, archives, museums, and other collections with a public face are places where humanistic research can be made available, accessible, and meaningful.\n\nAlthough historians are familiar with the sub-field of public history, other disciplines have not developed the potential for outreach in such a direct, institutionalized way. It is hard to imagine the awarding of a degree in, say, public art history. But in this class our students were taking on that very role as curators presenting research through a lively interactive tool with broad dissemination.\n\nIn developing their object itineraries for the Walters Art Museum and Google Earth, students had to consider both the historical narratives they were tracing and the matter of presenting them to the public. What information would be accessible? How could they both engage and challenge their audience? How would they balance the nuanced elements of their story with the broader theoretical issues at stake in the project? What is lost in the task of producing highly condensed text, and what might be gained?\n\nIn all of our museum-based practicum courses we face the challenge of fitting student work into an established institutional frame. Classrooms are messy places where ideas are tested and debated. Despite our best efforts, the many young voices we work with over the semester may not easily gel into the perfect, marketable whole that modern museums require. Our students carefully crafted their texts, which Walters professionals then polished to a sheen. The students constructed imaginative itineraries that we honed to fit a simpler, more streamlined model.\n\nIf it seems like the nature of university research (independent, serendipitous, evolving) cannot quite square with museum exhibitions (corporate, formal, fixed), there is nevertheless much to be gained from encouraging their intersection—for students, audiences, and collections, and for universities as well. University humanities made more public are also more relevant, appreciated, and valued.','Elizabeth Rodini - Commentary','Material Migrations, like many of the practicum courses offered in the Program in Museums and Society (M&S), gave students the chance to engage directly with objects, conduct research in and around those materials, and, most distinctively, develop a final project to be shared with a general audience—in this case, Google Earth “tours” of object provenance histories, to be incorporated into the website of the Walters Art Museum. M&S practicum projects take the form of exhibitions, both actual and virtual; interpretative materials, such as audio tours, gallery guides, and websites; and program development. I like to think of them as works of “public humanities,” sharing the research we do in the university with a larger audience.','inherit','open','open','','1132-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','',1132,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1132-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3848,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','Art on the Move was an outcome of the course Behind the Scenes at the Walters Art Museum: Material Migrations, offered at the Walters Art Museum through the <a href=\"http://krieger.jhu.edu/museums/\">Program in Museums and Society</a>at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 2009. Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman were co-instructors and, with the technical guidance of Reid Sczerba, Multimedia Development Specialist in the university’s Center for Educational Resources, devised and oversaw this project. The course and project were funded by an Arts Innovation Grant from Johns Hopkins.\n\n<h4>Excerpt from course syllabus:</h4>\n\nThe goals of this class can be broken down into several categories:\n<ul>\n	<li>investigating the various ways/means/motives for the circulation of objects, and considering how meaning is shaped by context, from antiquity to the present and including the museum itself;</li>\n	<li>conducting in-depth, independent research on objects in the Walters’ collection;</li>\n	<li>experimenting with different styles of writing and narration;</li>\n	<li>learning about different areas of museum practice, including curation, conservation, registration, and education;</li>\n	<li>applying these experiences to the production of interpretative tools for public audiences of the Walters, in the form of Google Earth itineraries.</li>\n</ul>\nEach student will choose two* objects from the Walters collection to research, focusing on the “trajectory” of the objects and their shifting significance in different contexts. Research will involve studying the objects and object files at the museum as well as work in the Johns Hopkins University library and online. That work will be analyzed, interpreted, and gathered into a Google Earth Map “itinerary” for each object. Why? To share what we are learning with the public. This is a fundamental task of museums, and in this course we extended that mission to the undergraduate classroom.\n\n(*The seven students worked on two objects each; we selected some of these for the final presentation on the Walters website.)','Walters - Project Description/Syllabus','','inherit','open','open','','1130-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','',1130,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1130-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3849,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','<img class=\"size-full wp-image-1189\" title=\"walters_student action photo_devos\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/walters_student-action-photo_devos.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"426\" /><span class=\"caption\"> Dakota DeVos (pointing at books) with Antiphonary for Abbess of Sainte-Marie of Beaupré, ink on parchment (Flemish, 1290). Photo: Will Kirk, <a href=\"http://homewoodphoto.jhu.edu\">homewoodphoto.jhu.edu</a>.</span>\n\n<strong>1. Describe the sorts of work you did in developing your Google Earth presentation on this object. (You might consider both the unique forms of research involved and modes/methods of interpretation.)</strong>\nThis project required a diverse approach to research, including reading topical books and contemporary articles, conducting interviews with Walters conservators and curators, and making comparisons with similar objects from the period or in the artists’ oeuvres. However, an exhaustive physical examination of the objects themselves was the starting and ending point for piecing together the objects’ paths of alteration, ownership, and usage. Our final product was meant to offer a new way for viewers to connect with an object, so both our maps and audio clips reinforce our findings by continually asking the viewer to look closely at the evidence right in front of them.\n\n<strong>2. What did you learn from this project that distinguished it from other academic courses?</strong>\nThis course offered three unique qualities. First, our research was meant for publication for museum visitors rather than exclusively for our professors. Second, we were able to do hands-on research with many of the Walters’ most revered objects while curators and conservators guided us in our examinations. Finally, this course encouraged an object-centric view of history, which was antithetical, conceptually, to the art history courses I had taken until that point. As an art history major I was accustomed to viewing specific art historical objects as close studies of broader trends that characterized the periods in which they were made. However, our assignment for Material Migrations was concerned not only with a study of the object’s creation and use in its own time, but also how its use changed throughout its history. I came away from the course with a greater appreciation for the power of contextualization. Art objects rarely remain static relics of a bygone era; rather, they continue to have vibrant lives and changing effects on their successive owners and audiences, not the least of which is their position as a tool for learning in the museum.\n\n<strong>3. What was it like to create a final project that would be presented to the public?</strong>\nThe project was intended to engage as broad a scope of museum visitors as possible, including youths and viewers who might have no background on the object, while still interesting our academic peers. Part of what made these objects so fascinating was the very unwieldiness of their provenance. I decided on central themes for both of my objects and ultimately cut out much of my research in order to focus on their tortuous histories. Considerations of display also affected the content of the map and audio. For example, while some of the pages of the illuminated manuscript I researched had beautiful drolleries in their margins, it was impractical to cite specific instances because only one spread of the fragile manuscript could be on display, and it might not have any drolleries.\n\n<strong>4. What did you learn from working in a professional museum and in conjunction with its staff?</strong>\nI chose one of my objects, the Beaupré Antiphonary, specifically because I had the opportunity to work with Professor Tilghman and the Walters’ rare books curator, Dr. William Noel. Collaborating with two of the top scholars in the field on an object that they knew intimately remains one of the brightest moments of my undergraduate career.\n\n<strong>5. What did this course/project and the opportunity to work with museum objects and their archival records mean to your education? your future plans? your general interests?</strong>\nThis course reinforced my ambition to work in the field of museums because I found the work rewarding and academically invigorating. It was meaningful and exhilarating to produce work for a class that would help enrich the presentation of the Walters’ holdings.','Dakota Devos - Commentary','This project required a diverse approach to research, including reading topical books and contemporary articles, conducting interviews with Walters conservators and curators, and making comparisons with similar objects from the period or in the artists’ oeuvres. However, an exhaustive physical examination of the objects themselves was the starting and ending point for piecing together the objects’ paths of alteration, ownership, and usage. Our final product was meant to offer a new way for viewers to connect with an object, so both our maps and audio clips reinforce our findings by continually asking the viewer to look closely at the evidence right in front of them.','inherit','open','open','','1128-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','',1128,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1128-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3850,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','<img class=\"size-full wp-image-1193\" title=\"walters_student action photo_tkacs\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/walters_student-action-photo_tkacs.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"426\" /><span class=\"caption\">\nJoan Tkcas (on far right, in brown) and Casket with Scenes of Romances, ivory and bone with modern iron mounts (French, 1330-1350). Photo: Will Kirk, <a href=\"http://homewoodphoto.jhu.edu\">homewoodphoto.jhu.edu</a>.</span>\n\n<strong>1. Describe the sorts of work you did in developing your Google Earth presentation on this object. (You might consider both the unique forms of research involved and modes/methods of interpretation.)</strong>\n\nI researched two objects for this project, a painted tile and an ivory casket. The Walters Art Museum had a thorough record of the objects’ provenances, so the bulk of my time was spent uncovering details about the lives and tastes of their previous owners. It was important to me to understand why they found the objects interesting enough to purchase. If the owners were art collectors, I tried finding other objects in their collections to get a sense of their taste. From there, it was a matter of organizing the object’s history into a simple and compelling narrative.\n\n<strong>2. What did you learn from this project that distinguished it from other academic courses?</strong>\n\nThe credit line that you see on the typical museum label does not do justice to the histories of these objects. For example, the ivory casket I researched was made in the fourteenth century and was probably meant to function as a jewelry box, but one of its later owners took the individual panels of the case apart and framed them. He was looking at the casket in a completely different way than we do now. I did not know this before I started the project, and the research gave me a new appreciation for just how dynamic these objects are.\n\n<strong>3. What was it like to create a final project that would be presented to the public?</strong>\n\nThe Google Earth project was a lesson in learning how to write concisely. After spending a semester researching the history of a given object, the temptation is to then write a long-winded report on all that you had discovered. But very few people would be interested in reading something like that, I think. It is a bit harder to boil down everything you have learned into a punchy and informative presentation.\n\n<strong>4. What did you learn from working in a professional museum and in conjunction with its staff?</strong>\n\nThe Walters’ staff was incredibly giving of their time. We met with Gary Vikan, the museum director, Robert Mintz, the curator of Asian art, and William Noel, the curator of manuscripts. We got to look at the museum’s storage, and learned about what art museums take into consideration when accessioning works of art. What I remember best was getting to meet with Amanda Kodeck, a member of the museum’s education department, and getting feedback on what we had written for the project. That kind of collaboration was incredibly helpful.\n\n<strong>5. What did this course/project and the opportunity to work with museum objects and their archival records mean to your education? your future plans? your general interests?</strong>\n\nThe Google Earth project was a first for me. In other classes I may have had to research a single object for a paper, but I had never focused solely on an object’s provenance. This project proved to be a very worthwhile experience for me. Right now I am an intern at the Georgia Museum of Art and I spend a lot of my time working with the archival materials of the museum’s Pierre Daura Study Center. I do not know if I would have had this opportunity without my experience working on the Google Earth project at the Walters.','Joan Tkacs - Commentary','I researched two objects for this project, a painted tile and an ivory casket. The Walters Art Museum had a thorough record of the objects’ provenances, so the bulk of my time was spent uncovering details about the lives and tastes of their previous owners. It was important to me to understand why they found the objects interesting enough to purchase. If the owners were art collectors, I tried finding other objects in their collections to get a sense of their taste. From there, it was a matter of organizing the object’s history into a simple and compelling narrative.','inherit','open','open','','1126-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','',1126,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1126-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3851,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','<span class=\"alignright wp-caption-text\" style=\"width: 166px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1223\" style=\"margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"szerba\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/szerba.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />Photo: Jay VanRensselaer, <a href=\"http://homewoodphoto.jhu.edu\">homewoodphoto.jhu.edu</a>.</span>\n<div><em>Sczerba worked closely with the course instructors, Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman, to develop and refine the Google Earth tools and to train students in building tours.</em></div>\n<strong>1. Describe your role in this project. </strong>\nI work for a faculty support center at Johns Hopkins University called the Center for Educational Resources (CER). As the center’s multimedia developer, I aided Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman with the technical and logistical aspects of the project. This included determining a viable technology for the project tours and developing resource guides that aided students’ tour creation.\n\n<strong>2. What tasks did you perform at various stages of the project?</strong>\nInitially we had to find a program that would be available freely (both in access and cost) for students to use with a relatively low learning curve. We selected Google Earth because it allows tour creation with rich media and text mapped to the earth, and it is free to download on PCs and Macs. I then created a template tour, set up with pre-made placemarks as a starting point for the students, and content layout templates for the appearance of the tour’s placemarks. After those two resources were set, I needed to create a well-written and comprehensible workflow. I chose to create both a visual and textual workflow to clearly express what actions needed to happen and at what stages. The final step was to present this workflow to the students in a training workshop so that they could see how it all came together and do it themselves.\n\n<strong>3. What sorts of interactions did you have with faculty, students, and other members of the project community over the course of the project?</strong>\nI met with Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman initially to gather the project’s requirements, then later to introduce them to the proposed solution. One of my colleagues from the CER also joined these meetings to offer ideas. I was also available by e-mail to answer questions as they came up, especially during the process of approving the workflow, as it needed to be as simple as possible to follow. I also held a training workshop for the students with Professor Rodini. I continued to be available for questions by e-mail as the students worked on their projects.\n\n<strong>4. What particular challenges did this project present?</strong>\nThis project required that every placemark on a tour include images at that location. The only way to do this in Google Earth was to code it yourself. Certain aspects of using Google Earth were easy to master, but customizing the appearance of the placemarks requires HTML programming knowledge. Despite the fact that most students nowadays have grown up with the Internet, we have found that very few know how to use HTML. Our solution utilized an online HTML editor that had a prebuilt HTML template loaded in it. When the students were ready to create the content for their placemarks, they simply copied the content from a Word document and then pasted it in the HTML editor to generate the code. The students pasted that code into their Google Earth placemark, circumventing the need for them to learn HTML.\n\n<strong>5. What lessons did you learn from this project and what might you do differently in the future? </strong>\nA more ideal solution may have been to create an application that would generate the tours without using Google Earth. This would have taken more time and resources to build than we had, but it could have been a useful application for other courses as well. It was disappointing to realize that Google Earth did not have an HMTL editor built in, and that there was no application that could suit our needs at the time. Perhaps when this course is offered again, there will be an ideal solution available to allow students to create tours and focus on the content rather than the technology. If not, then perhaps we will have the time to build one ourselves and share it.','Reid Sczerba - Commentary','I work for a faculty support center at Johns Hopkins University called the Center for Educational Resources (CER). As the center’s multimedia developer, I aided Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman with the technical and logistical aspects of the project. This included determining a viable technology for the project tours and developing resource guides that aided students’ tour creation.','inherit','open','open','','1123-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:54','2013-04-18 20:55:54','',1123,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1123-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3852,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','','Mapping the Provenance of Museum Objects','The final project for students enrolled in the course Behind the Scenes at the Walters Art Museum: Material Migrations, offered at the Walters Art Museum through Johns Hopkins University, was to trace the provenance of museum objects and describe their historical significance through Google Earth tours. This case study features the work of three students. Their tours, as well as those of several others, have been published by the Walters Art Museum as part of the online exhibit <a href=\"http://thewalters.org/earth/\">Art on the Move</a>.','inherit','open','open','','1121-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1121,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1121-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3853,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1380\" title=\"lehigh_support head shot_maserjian\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_support-head-shot_maserjian.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />I’d like to tell you a story, one about a series of experiences that changed the way I work with students and faculty at Lehigh. In fact, the story is about stories—digital storytelling, to be exact. Digital storytelling uses computer-based still and moving images, text, audio, and music to document experiences, ideas, and research.\n\nIn the fall of 2005 I had the pleasure of working with English professor Ed Gallagher in an experimental, first-year writing course, “Digital Songs, Stories, and Histories,” that offered students new ways to communicate through a variety of multi-media assignments. For one assignment the students were asked to create a video based on a research question they developed from materials they found in Lehigh’s Digital Library project, <a href=\"http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/remain/con/digwriting.html\">I Remain: A Digital Archive of Letters, Manuscripts, and Ephemera</a>. The site contains hundreds of items from the university’s Special Collections and Archives that represent five centuries of writers, explorers, scientists, philosophers, and politicians.\n\nThe students were asked to select a document from the site that piqued their curiosity, transcribe that document, formulate a historical question, develop a thesis, select materials that would support that thesis, and produce a video based on those efforts. The vast majority of the students embraced the archival and technological challenge. The results appear on the <em>I Remain</em> site.\n\nIn order to understand the content development and technological challenges our students faced, I delved into my family archives and produced a short personal video story about my father. I was amazed at the ability of this process to challenge and change my perspective on the past. Cathartic is the only way I can describe my experience. Clearly smitten with this medium, the following year I taught a course for the History Department, Digital History and Video. This class had a mix of undergraduate and graduate students who were also asked to explore the archival materials on the <em>I Remain</em> site. They had to perform many of the same assignments as the previous class did, but, as the course level dictated, they had to be even more rigorous in their research. The students wrote a footnoted essay about their document(s), and then converted their research essay into a script to include narration and accompanying visuals.\n\nOne of the Digital History students, a senior with a double major in history and education, discovered a treasure trove of primary sources when she came upon a scrapbook of memorabilia related to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The scrapbook was compiled by American boundary commissioner, Rhode Island Secretary of State, historian, and author John R. Bartlett. Using many of the images in the scrapbook, she constructed a <a href=\"http://player.vimeo.com/video/40877170\">seven-minute video about the assassination of President Lincoln</a> and the effect his death had on the country. Rather than address a scholarly audience in her production, she chose to produce a documentary with a general audience in mind. The storytelling choices she made in her narration and accompanying voice-over collaborations with faculty and fellow classmates are clearly directed toward that general audience. Though initially intimidated by the use of new technology, this student was pleased that she was able to face the challenge and learn a new skill that would help her in her career in elementary education.\n\nSince these initial forays into student-produced documentary, I am pleased to say that this form of communication is alive and well at Lehigh University. As the number of requests for video projects grew, Library and Technology Services formed the Documentary Resource Team. The Team is comprised of librarians, instructional technologists, and media specialists who help faculty and students navigate the opportunities and challenges of video production. In many of these classes, students use physical and virtual archives extensively in their research and image selection. With the opportunities of archival discovery also come the challenges of representing findings.\n\nThe materials we uncover in archives and the way we choose to use them has provoked an ongoing series of questions about copyright, research methodology, and documentary ethics. Regardless of the event (long ago or yesterday) or the individual (living or dead), the lessons our students learn about their obligations in representing the lives of others are important ones. What is at stake when, as digital storytellers, we document the experience of others? What happens when those experiences move beyond the confines of the classroom and become part of a larger audience at public screenings or on the web? The questions of authority, privacy, responsibility, and moral obligations are good ones with no easy answers. Luckily, as educators, we are not in the business of easy answers.','Julia Maserjian - Commentary','I’d like to tell you a story, one about a series of experiences that changed the way I work with students and faculty at Lehigh. In fact, the story is about stories—digital storytelling, to be exact. Digital storytelling uses computer-based still and moving images, text, audio, and music to document experiences, ideas, and research.','inherit','open','open','','1116-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1116,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1116-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3854,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1378\" title=\"lehigh_student head shot_weber\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-head-shot_weber.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />\n\nDuring the fall 2011 semester, I was a part of Lehigh University’s Theories of Masculinity class, an upper-level English and Women’s Studies course. Initially, I signed up for it because it was a prerequisite for graduating with department honors. As part of this course, we created a documentary film on coeducation and its effects on men and masculinity at Lehigh, which is currently celebrating its fortieth anniversary of admitting female students. My role in this film became a challenging and ultimately very rewarding part of my education at Lehigh.\n\nCreating the film required extensive use of Lehigh University’s Special Collections. As someone unfamiliar with the process of researching in the archives, I was unaware of the extensive time and effort such an undertaking required. Yet, it was through delving into the pages and pages of yearbook photos from the late 1960s and early 1970s (see Figures <a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image2.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\">2</a>, <a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image3.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\">3</a>, <a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image6.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\">6</a>), and seeing headlines from that time in <em>The Brown and White</em>, Lehigh’s student newspaper (see Figures <a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\">1</a>, <a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image5.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\">5</a>, <a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image7.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\">7</a>), that I began to appreciate the power of the project our class was creating. This project allowed me to see the trajectory of Lehigh’s transition to a coeducational institution, a transition colored by many challenges, including sexism. These challenges are not easily visible in 2011, forty years later, so seeing the headlines and pictures in the archives literally, and in a unique way, demonstrated the hurdles women had to face at Lehigh. Some were the only girls in their classes, and all had to overcome being seen simply as weekend entertainment for the male students, as was the case for the women who were bussed in and out on Saturdays from nearby Cedar Crest College prior to coeducation (see <a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\">Figure 1</a>). I had been taking my role as a woman on Lehigh’s campus for granted, and this process really made me consider the journey that others had taken to provide me with such an opportunity.\n\nThe archives played a major role in our documentary. The images and video clips we found provided evidence of our claims about the challenges women came up against at a conservative institution transitioning to coeducation, and in a way that our words alone could not do justice to. Simply hearing about the awkward mixers held before coeducation was implemented is not as powerful as seeing pictures of wide-eyed men groping at women, or of the huge amounts of alcohol they consumed at these parties. Lehigh’s archives are not used nearly enough. I am embarrassed to admit that as a first-semester senior English major I am just now getting my first taste of their value. It is my hope that our documentary project will serve as a positive example of the power that these resources can provide to our university. As these images fade further and further into the past, students have the chance to keep them alive in our contemporary work by using them in various classes and research projects. I hope that our documentary project can show the university, and especially other students like me who may not have known the extent of the material available, the value of these resources to the legacy of our institution and the appreciation of our education.','Kim Weber - Commentary','During the fall 2011 semester, I was a part of Lehigh University’s Theories of Masculinity class, an upper-level English and Women’s Studies course. Initially, I signed up for it because it was a prerequisite for graduating with department honors. As part of this course, we created a documentary film on coeducation and its effects on men and masculinity at Lehigh, which is currently celebrating its fortieth anniversary of admitting female students. My role in this film became a challenging and ultimately very rewarding part of my education at Lehigh.','inherit','open','open','','1113-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1113,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1113-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3855,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1374\" title=\"lehigh_instructor head shot_kramp\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_instructor-head-shot_kramp.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />My fall 2011 English and Women’s Studies upper-level undergraduate class, Theories of Masculinity, was designed to coordinate with the fortieth anniversary of admitting undergraduate women to Lehigh University. A major component of this course was a student-produced documentary film that considers the effects of coeducation on men and masculinity at Lehigh. This film project provided my students with an opportunity to examine critically Lehigh’s institutional history, focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s. While it was not my initial intention, I was extremely pleased by the students’ abilities to research and study their own school’s history. They made extensive use of Lehigh’s Archives and Special Collections to collect numerous articles, documents, and perhaps most importantly, photographs, and they incorporated these materials into the different sections of the film (see Figures 1-6, below). Students discovered several cultural texts from the 1960s and 1970s that portrayed Lehigh as a haven for privileged masculinity, a sphere in which men appeared largely ignorant of the volatile civil rights movement and the emergent mid-century women’s movement. And yet, my students’ research also revealed that the Lehigh community of this era was also clearly cognizant of impending social changes. As my students tracked this tension between the ossification of male hegemony and the certainty of coming shifts, they developed a newfound appreciation for the importance of institutional history to the present operations of a university.\n\nThe prominence of Greek life is certainly one such feature of this legacy. Two of the four segments of the film address the role of fraternities and Greek social life, including the final section, which focuses on men and masculinity in Lehigh’s contemporary culture. The students who explored Lehigh’s mid-century Greek culture found ample textual evidence of its importance, including photographs, yearbook coverage, and film footage. When students interviewed alumni from the 1960s and 1970s, the men reported that Greek life had waned significantly in the years following coeducation. But when other students spoke with current male and female students, these individuals emphasized the enduring importance of fraternities and sororities to the culture of Lehigh. In addition, the group of filmmakers who focused on the period prior to coeducation highlighted the ways in which women were brought to campus for Saturday evening social events such as dances. My students interviewed several alumni who commented on the awkwardness of such activities, for both the men and the women. They even include a telling newspaper story in which Cedar Crest College, a small women’s college in nearby Allentown, is referenced as the bordello of Lehigh Valley (see <a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\">Figure 1</a>). The student filmmakers who covered the years immediately following coeducation also treated the clumsiness of men’s interactions with women; they point to challenges in managing facilities and planning building construction, developing female athletics, and integrating women into extra-curricular clubs and organizations, such as the marching band. The filmmakers who treated contemporary conceptions of masculinity within the Lehigh community explicitly referenced the enduring legacy of sexual inequality and the perceived intellectual inferiority of women. They cited recent newspaper accounts on persistent gender inequities on campus and conducted numerous interviews on the topic. While it may very well have been unintentional, these students never interviewed a male and female subject together; instead, they consistently showed pairs of male students, suggesting the extant homosocial culture of Lehigh.\n\nI wanted my students to engage the history and culture of Lehigh through film technology because it would provide them with an opportunity to artistically synthesize a variety of different kinds of texts (photos, newspaper articles, found film footage, interviews, etc.). The film medium also allowed my students to share their work in public forums, respond to questions and concerns, and discuss their own research and artistic strategies. In effect, the film project allowed my students to contribute to the very institutional history of Lehigh University that they were researching. The archival work my students completed for this film has effectively introduced them to both the depths of information housed in Lehigh’s Special Collections and the profound relevance of institutional history to their own educational experiences. As I reflect upon the experience, there is no doubt in my mind that the most important single component of this process was done long before this class started; the cataloguing and digitization of the university newspaper and annual yearbooks made such a classroom project possible. The film has allowed students, faculty, and alumni to look back into Lehigh’s past, and, while this project has undoubtedly opened some uncomfortable topics and discussions, it has also reminded current and former members of the Lehigh community of their shared history.\n<div><span id=\"attachment_1388\" class=\"left alignleft\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1388\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image1\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1-333x159.jpg\" alt=\"The Trade with Cedar Crest.\" width=\"333\" height=\"159\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 1: </em>The Trade with Cedar Crest. From Lehigh’s student newspaper, <em>The Brown &amp; White</em> (September 17, 1971). Image courtesy of Lehigh University Digital Library.</span></span><span id=\"attachment_1410\" class=\"left alignleft\" style=\"width: 183px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image2.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1410\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image2\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image2-183x250.jpg\" alt=\"Lehigh Student Work\" width=\"183\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 2: </em>Alpha Lambda Omega fraternity member list from <em>Epitome</em>, Lehigh’s yearbook (1970, p. 233). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span id=\"attachment_1390\" class=\"left alignleft\" style=\"width: 133px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image3.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1390\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image3\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image3-133x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"133\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 3: </em>A Lehigh student dances with his date at a mixer (<em>Epitome</em> 1970, p.252). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span><span id=\"attachment_1391\" class=\"left alignleft\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image4.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1391\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image4\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image4-333x233.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"233\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 4: </em>Photograph of the Class of 1948’s 15th reunion (1963). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span id=\"attachment_1392\" class=\"left alignleft\" style=\"width: 239px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image5.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1392\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image5\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image5-239x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"239\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 5: </em>Cartoon by Gene Mater in <em>The Brown &amp; White</em> (September 14, 1971). Image courtesy of Lehigh University Digital Library.</span></span><span style=\"clear: both; display: block; overflow: auto;\"> </span><span id=\"attachment_1393\" class=\"left alignleft\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 15px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image6.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1393\" title=\"lehigh_student work_image6\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image6-333x245.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"245\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 6: </em>Student Gene Mater speaking out at a student event (<em>Epitome</em> 1970, p.40). Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries.</span></span></div>','Michael Kramp - Commentary','My fall 2011 English and Women’s Studies upper-level undergraduate class, Theories of Masculinity, was designed to coordinate with the fortieth anniversary of admitting undergraduate women to Lehigh University. A major component of this course was a student-produced documentary film that considers the effects of coeducation on men and masculinity at Lehigh. This film project provided my students with an opportunity to examine critically Lehigh’s institutional history, focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s. ','inherit','open','open','','1110-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1110,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1110-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3856,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','<h4>Students in an upper-level English and Women\'s Studies course produced this documentary film, <em>The Development of Masculinity: Lehigh, Coeducation, and Its Impact</em>.</h4>','Archival Materials into Documentary Film','Students in an English and Women’s Studies undergraduate course at Lehigh University used materials from Lehigh’s Special Collections and University Archives to create a documentary film. The students used these archival resources, along with interviews and other research, to tell a chapter of their own institution’s history, focusing on issues of gender and masculinity as Lehigh went from all-male to coed in 1971.','inherit','open','open','','1108-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1108,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1108-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3857,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','When I heard about English 241: Archeology of Text, I was immediately excited. I had been working in Special Collections and Archives at Goucher College for about a year, and I knew the class would give me a chance to learn more about books and archives in a setting that would encourage discussions with my peers. When it came time to pick a collection for my final project, I decided to work with archival materials rather than books so that I could challenge myself.\n\nWhile working in Special Collections, I had often walked by large blue boxes containing scrapbooks, but I had yet to look through them. When I began leafing through them, I found that I learned as much about Goucher College as I did about the women who put the scrapbooks together. Many of the scrapbooks had things in common, including Valentines, pressed flowers, calling cards, and photographs. But what intrigued me most were the dance cards. I had never before encountered dance cards, or even heard of them, even though I had been dancing all my life. Many of the dance cards were from the U.S. Naval Academy, a nearby all-male school in need of women with whom to dance. Goucher girls would often travel to Annapolis for the weekend dances and bring back dance cards as souvenirs.\n\n<img class=\" wp-image-1275\" title=\"goucher_student action photo_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-action-photo_brand.jpg\" alt=\"Cassie Brand working in the former Rare Book Collection Seminar Room \" width=\"510\" height=\"382\" />\n<span class=\"caption\" style=\"width: 510px\">Cassie Brand working in the former Rare Book Collection Seminar Room (December 2007) with an early Chaucer edition from Special Collections (Ed. John Urry, London: Printed for Bernard Lintot, 1721). </span>\n\nWhen I began researching these cards, I found very little information. I went to all of the reference librarians I could find, but even they had difficulties because very few secondary sources were available. I looked through all the etiquette books I could get my hands on and even asked people to tell me what they knew about dance cards. Those who knew of them provided me with the basic information I needed to study the cards.\n\nI contacted the U.S. Naval Academy Archives, and with the help of Nancy Magnuson, Goucher College Librarian, I made an appointment to see their collection. There I found an almost complete run of dance cards from the Farewell Ball, which was held every year after graduation. Some were blank, some were filled in, some contained photographs, and some still had their tiny pencils attached. Looking through the cards, I found that they could be studied in several ways. One could examine print history, dance history, social history, or even one woman’s history of dance partners. The first and last dance cards were so drastically different that I chose to look at how the cards changed over the years. I found that the cards’ modifications reflected the changes in social dances.\n\nThough I have not yet returned to the dance card collections to study them further, they have never been far from my mind. I am still trying to convince people that dance cards are brilliant and should be reinstated for social events. Dance cards remain an interest of mine, and I would love to eventually write their complete history.','Cassie Brand - Commentary','When I heard about English 241: Archeology of Text, I was immediately excited. I had been working in Special Collections and Archives at Goucher College for about a year, and I knew the class would give me a chance to learn more about books and archives in a setting that would encourage discussions with my peers. When it came time to pick a collection for my final project, I decided to work with archival materials rather than books so that I could challenge myself.','inherit','open','open','','1051-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1051,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1051-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3858,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','','Hands-On Research with Rare Books and Ephemera ','This case study features work that two students completed in an English class at Goucher College. The course, The Archeology of Text, offers students an understanding of the social and historical frameworks for the production and consumption of text, beginning with the digital age and moving backwards in time. Students are also trained in bibliographic research skills, which they apply to objects in Goucher’s Special Collections library. These objects then become the subjects of a research paper that serves as the final course project.','inherit','open','open','','1047-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1047,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1047-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3859,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1279\" title=\"goucher_instructor image_sanders\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_instructor-image_sanders.jpg\" alt=\"Sanders\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />Students prepare for English 241: Archeology of Text research projects in twelve weeks of readings and laboratory experiences, which introduce the skills necessary to work with early printed books and archival documents. (For the text of the assignment, see <a href=\"http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng241/241_individual_research_projects_F09.htm\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>). The goal of these projects is to enable each student to pursue a self-designed creative or descriptive study of books, manuscripts, and other artifacts from Special Collections and Archives. Because the course is interdisciplinary and students come from many majors, it is hard to predict where students’ curiosities will take them. The best way to encourage active student engagement is to prepare students for the widest range of book- and document-related work. Successful projects can lead to further research supported by Goucher’s Peirce Center fellowships.\n\nBeginning with the study of how a digital document is constructed and the history of the Internet’s “cloud” library, students practice searching online scholarly sites such as the <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em> (OED), WorldCat, <em>English Short-Title Catalog</em> (ESTC), and the continental library collections accessible through the University of Karlsruhe’s online catalog. They also explore using search engines and databases to identify and locate people, places, and things. Those skills provide interpretive context for hand-press books in the course’s next segment. After three weeks of studying typography, format, bindings, and hand-made paper and its manufacture, students have learned the most basic descriptive bibliography skills. This enables them to describe the edition-specific and copy-specific details of their “cadaver books,” a set of early printed books they handle each week to encourage safe and intelligent treatment of early paper and bindings. Finally, paper and parchment manuscript laboratories teach students to decipher secretary and scribal hands from the nineteenth through the thirteenth centuries. This enables them to interpret marginalia in early printed books, including owners’ inscriptions and other provenance and use evidence.\n\nSarah Kendall’s study of the Burke Austen Collection’s copy of the two-volume American first edition of Jane Austen’s <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816) represents a creative response to traditional rare-book provenance study, resulting in her discovery of a significant trove of correspondence in the book’s archival container. Before Alberta Burke brought the book to Baltimore, it had passed through the hands of Christina Broun Dalhousie (the Countess Dalhousie); a prominent collector, Frank J. Hogan; and a poet, Siegfried Sassoon. Kendall’s study demonstrates the way a book’s value changes as it moves from owner to owner, becoming as attractive for its associations and rarity as it is for its text. An archives-based approach to using the course’s analytical tools is represented by Cassie Brand’s study of U.S. Naval Academy dance cards found in the scrapbook kept by Goucher student Mary Lee Keith (Class of 1924), augmented by research at The Nimitz Library in Annapolis. Brand showed how the cards could be used to study crucial changes in American courtship conventions as women took control of their relations with potential suitors.\n\nThese two projects represent the course’s goal: to enable original, undergraduate, hands-on archival research using interdisciplinary skills:\n<ul>\n	<li>See images from <a href=\"http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng241/cassie_brand_IRP_imaging_Fall%202007.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Brand’s dance card project</a>.</li>\n	<li>See a portfolio of images of the <a href=\"http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng241/English_241_IRP_Images_F07.htm\" target=\"_blank\">2007 class researching final projects</a>.</li>\n</ul>','Arnold Sanders - Commentary','Students prepare for English 241, “Archeology of Text,” research projects in twelve weeks of readings and laboratory experiences which introduce skills necessary to work with early printed books and archival documents. The goal of these projects is to enable each student to pursue a self-designed creative or descriptive study of books, manuscripts, and other artifacts from Special Collections and Archives. Because the course is interdisciplinary and students come from many majors, it is hard to predict where students’ curiosities will take them. The best way to encourage active student engagement is prepare students for the widest range of book and document related work. Successful projects can lead to further research supported by Goucher’s Peirce Center fellowships.','inherit','open','open','','1049-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1049,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1049-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3860,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','As an undergraduate English major with a concentration in creative writing, I had always regarded books as a portal into the world of fiction, a place where I could study plots and themes, setting and syntax. I had never stopped to consider books as historical objects until my first class in English 241: Archeology of Text. The assignment for the final research paper seemed simple: use what we learned during the semester to explore, analyze, and describe a document of interest from Goucher’s Special Collections.\n\nI knew from the start that I was intrigued by Goucher’s prolific collection of Jane Austen materials, but needed something specific to spark my interest. Walking around the small Special Collections room in the Julia Rogers Library, my gaze landed on a blue box behind a glass case. I soon learned that inside that box lay the first American edition of <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816).  Nancy Magnuson, college librarian, told me all about Alberta Burke’s letters and thought that they might contain clues for my research. I have always been fascinated with letters (both reading and writing them), and the process of tracking a specific book through personal correspondences captivated me. I chose to study the 1816 first American edition of <em>Emma</em> and explore the letters that track how it found a home in Goucher’s library.\n\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-1273\" title=\"goucher_student action photo_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-action-photo_kendall.jpg\" alt=\"Sarah Kendall working with the Burke copy of the American first edition of Austen\'s Emma\" width=\"320\" height=\"375\" />\n<span class=\"caption\" style=\"width: 320px\">Sarah Kendall working with the Burke copy of the American first edition of Austen\'s Emma (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells & Lilly, Boston, 1816) in the former Rare Book Collection Seminar Room (December 2007).</span>\n\nI remain baffled by the amount of information and detailed history I discovered while writing a descriptive bibliography. I wrote detailed accounts of the letters from Alberta Burke and David Gilson, the letters between David Gilson and Henry Burke, and the 1816 first edition of <em>Emma</em>. After seeing the interest that both Alberta Burke and David Gilson had in the first American edition of <em>Emma</em>, I knew that perusing the pages and studying the tome in detail would be essential to revealing the book’s history. Sifting through dozens of letters hoping to find mention of <em>Emma</em> thrilled me to no end. Reading different letters from various sources also illuminated how various people valued the first edition and why they wanted it in their possession. The circuit of corresponding materials proved equally intriguing and helpful for tracking down how the book traveled from Philadelphia to Goucher’s library.\n\nI learned that by latching on to a specific topic, I could follow a steady thread of conversation about <em>Emma</em>. The experience made me feel like a genuine historian instead of an undergraduate student simply researching journal articles or internet resources. It felt very special and intellectually stimulating to handle history with my own hands! I even discovered two additional letters hidden between the inside cover and the title page of the first volume. Unearthing these two letters felt very encouraging and proved that there is always the possibility of finding something new within the archives.','Sarah Kendall - Commentary','As an undergraduate English major with a concentration in creative writing, I had always regarded books as a portal into the world of fiction, a place where I could study plots and themes, setting and syntax. I had never stopped to consider books as historical objects until my first class in English 241: Archeology of Text. The assignment for the final research paper seemed simple: use what we learned during the semester to explore, analyze, and describe a document of interest from Goucher’s Special Collections.','inherit','open','open','','1053-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1053,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1053-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3861,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','<h4>The student work for this case study is two archival tools designed by Tom Smith:  a low-cost robotic scanner for paper-based materials and a web application for an oral history archive.  Click on the images below to learn more about these tools.</h4>\n<a href=\"http://projectgado.org/\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1258\" title=\"jhu_student project photo 1_gado\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_student-project-photo-1_gado.jpg\" alt=\"The Gado 2 Robotic Scanner scanning photos at the Afro-American Newspapers archive.\" width=\"638\" height=\"478\" /></a> <span class=\"caption\">The Gado 2 Robotic Scanner scanning photos at the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> archive.</span>\n\n<a href=\"http://eboh.jhu.edu/oralhistoryplayer\"><img class=\" wp-image-2451\" style=\"margin-top: 30px;\" title=\"jhu_student project photo 2_eboh\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/jhu_student-project-photo-2_eboh.jpg\" alt=\"The East Baltimore Oral History Player showing the index entry for a resident whose story Tom Smith helped to document and record.\" width=\"630\" /></a> <span class=\"caption\">The East Baltimore Oral History Player showing the index entry for a resident whose story Tom Smith helped to document and record.</span>','Student-Built Archival Tools','This case study focuses on a student who contributed much more than expected to digital projects by creating two archival tools: a web application for an oral history archive and a low-cost robotic scanner for paper-based materials. In a practicum course at Johns Hopkins University, Tom Smith and his peers worked on recording and organizing oral histories. Smith also developed an audio player for the digital archive. This work brought him in contact with the <a href=\"http://archive.magazine.jhu.edu/2011/11/unboxing-history\">Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project</a> (DPAAP) and led Smith to invent another tool: the <a href=\"http://projectgado.org/\">Gado scanner</a>. This powerful, durable robotic scanner digitizes sensitive archival materials and can be built using simple components for less than $500.','inherit','open','open','','1057-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1057,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1057-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3862,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1244\" title=\"jhu_student photo_smith\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_student-photo_smith.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />When people think of Johns Hopkins University they think of medicine, and rightly so. JHU prepares people for medical school better than any college in the world. The medical attitude, however, extends beyond the bounded world of pre-meds. Hopkins often values the reductionism of the scientific method and the cleanliness of the lab over holism and real-world, big-picture thinking. In looking for classes during my sophomore year at JHU, then, I was surprised to find The Power of Place taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss. The course was a practicum, and all participants would conduct oral histories as part of the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH). This was a rare chance to get out of the infamous “Hopkins Bubble.” I signed up.\n\nDuring Power of Place I helped produce several oral histories. As interviews flowed in, however, I began to see a problem. Each interview was around two hours long and included a full transcript. From my class alone, the project would amass nearly thirty hours of audio and several hundred pages of text. Making use of those materials would be tough. As a software developer, I saw a solution. I imagined a tool that could link transcripts with audio, allow people to tag important areas within interviews, and make all the EBOH materials searchable. With support from the university, I spent the next year working with Professor Shell-Weiss to make my idea into a working web application.\n\nWhile working on EBOH, I started visiting archives. I could find few digital images of East Baltimore, and I wanted to know why. On a trip to the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> with Moira Hinderer, I found a plethora of visual materials. Very few, however, had been digitized. The main factor was cost; resources to manually digitize the <em>Afro</em> collection simply were not available. Again, I saw a technical solution: I would build a robot. I proposed creating an automatic scanner that could lift and digitize the <em>Afro</em>’s sensitive artifacts, all for less than $500. No one at JHU thought it would happen. Luckily, Professor Shell-Weiss managed to raise some funds, and I spent a summer prototyping. The result was the Gado 1, a proof-of-concept that would later scan over 1,000 images at the <em>Afro</em>. The price tag was $496.\n\nAfter graduating from JHU in May 2011, I wanted to continue refining my technology. With support from the JHU Sheridan Libraries and the Abell Foundation (a regional grantsmaker), I secured enough funding to work on my project full time. In December 2011, I completed the Gado 2, a second-generation machine that dramatically outpaces the original. Since testing began, my machine has digitized over 3,000 artifacts at the <em>Afro</em>, at a tiny fraction of the cost of manual scanning. In February 2012, we made these images available to the general public and launched GadoImages.com to distribute them to paying licensors. I believe Gado has the potential to dramatically alter the economics of archival digitization. I would never be at this point without that first push to step outside the classroom and start thinking in broader terms.','Tom Smith - Commentary','When people think of Johns Hopkins University they think of medicine, and rightly so. JHU prepares people for medical school better than any college in the world. The medical attitude, however, extends beyond the bounded world of pre-meds. Hopkins often values the reductionism of the scientific method and the cleanliness of the lab over holism and real-world, big-picture thinking. In looking for classes during my sophomore year at JHU, then, I was surprised to find The Power of Place taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss. The course was a practicum, and all participants would conduct oral histories as part of the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH). This was a rare chance to get out of the infamous “Hopkins Bubble.” I signed up.','inherit','open','open','','1059-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1059,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1059-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3863,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1247\" title=\"jhu_teacher photo_hinderer\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_teacher-photo_hinderer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />Over the last four years, I have worked as a lecturer teaching courses about Baltimore and African American history, and I have also served as the project manager for the Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project (DPAAP), a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These experiences have shown me that students learn best when they are not simply taught history, but when they also act as historians. Baltimore offers both possibilities and challenges for students doing historical projects. Much of the city’s history remains unwritten, and historical materials are often tucked away in small archives and private homes. Records that are not easily accessible present a special problem for students who are constrained by time and transportation. Both the East Baltimore Oral History Project and the <em>Afro</em> Archives partnership seek to address these challenges by involving students in the process of uncovering, describing, and making accessible historical records, and then encouraging students to use these resources for historical research.\n\nThe East Baltimore Oral History Project involves students in the work of preserving the memories of established members of the East Baltimore community. For students, this work addresses a major complaint about life as a Johns Hopkins undergraduate: they are too removed from the life of the city, and they are not encouraged to interact with the city and its inhabitants in meaningful ways. The interviewing process has the additional benefit of making students experts, allowing them to bring a substantive point of view and body of evidence as they critique course readings and engage in class discussions. As interviews are added to the project website, students produce an accessible community history resource that will last well beyond the usual semester-long class project.\n\nDPAAP also depends heavily on the work of student archival interns, and on the technical skills of the current and former students who form the Project Gado team, led by recent Johns Hopkins University graduate Tom Smith. Archival interns have been involved in every step of uncovering the archives, from labeling boxes and shelves, to entering information into our archival database, to writing essays for our database website. This work has given interns a perspective on African American history usually reserved for history professionals. With materials pertaining to almost every local, national, and international aspect of Black history, interns are often asked to describe the central themes and narratives of this diverse archive. This challenge requires them to address the problem of twentieth-century information overload familiar to both historians and archivists. The Project Gado team offers a different set of solutions to the problem of preserving and making accessible vast amounts of archival materials. The members of Project Gado are involved in innovative work in the digital humanities as they create low-cost options for large-scale digitization. The work of Tom Smith and Project Gado suggests another possibility for hands-on coursework in history, courses that would integrate technical skills and the creation of hardware and software into a rigorous humanities education to prepare students to be twenty-first-century humanities scholars.','Moira Hinderer - Commentary','Over the last four years, I have worked as a lecturer teaching courses about Baltimore and African American history, and I have also served as the project manager for the Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project (DPAAP), a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the Afro-American Newspapers funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These experiences have shown me that students learn best when they are not simply taught history, but when they also act as historians. Baltimore offers both possibilities and challenges for students doing historical projects. Much of the city’s history remains unwritten, and historical materials are often tucked away in small archives and private homes. Records that are not easily accessible present a special problem for students who are constrained by time and transportation. Both the East Baltimore Oral History Project and the Afro Archives partnership seek to address these challenges by involving students in the process of uncovering, describing, and making accessible historical records, and then encouraging students to use these resources for historical research. ','inherit','open','open','','1062-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1062,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1062-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3864,1,'2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','In 2008 Tom Smith took a practicum course called The Power of Place, taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss through the <a href=\"http://krieger.jhu.edu/africana\">Center for Africana Studies</a>. The students recorded oral histories of residents of Baltimore\'s Middle East neighborhood for the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH), which they later assembled into a <a href=\"http://eboh.jhu.edu/oralhistoryplayer/\">digital audio archive</a>. The course led Smith to think about how to integrate the recordings with their lengthy transcripts. In addition to the interviews he conducted for the class, Smith eventually built the player software featured on the project website. The software that he developed is open source, so anyone can use it without having to pay license or royalty fees. Smith’s company, ESDA LLC, can implement the software on a contract basis for those without the expertise to do it in-house.\n\n<a href=\"http://morgue.afro.com/AfroArchon/\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1253\" title=\"jhu_project photo_afro\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_project-photo_afro.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"638\" height=\"425\" /></a> <span class=\"caption\" style=\"margin-bottom: 30px;\">Unprocessed boxes of archival material, Baltimore <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em>, 2008.</span>\n\nSmith’s research on practical archival problems brought him into contact with Moira Hinderer, the project manager for the <a href=\"http://magazine.jhu.edu/2011/11/unboxing-history/\">Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project</a> (DPAAP), a partnership between the Baltimore <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> and Johns Hopkins University. DPAAP focuses on organizing and preserving the archives of the <em>Afro-American Newspapers;</em> they have worked on the newspapers’ <a href=\"http://morgue.afro.com/AfroArchon/\">morgue collections</a> as well as personal papers and institutional records. Hinderer, who is also a lecturer in the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins, teaches classes in which students work directly with the <em>Afro</em>’s archives. Smith watched Hinderer\'s students and archival interns involved in the painstaking labor of flatbed scanning and wondered if this process could be made more efficient. The time and expense involved in the digitization of delicate archival materials at the <em>Afro</em> prompted Smith to invent another tool: the <a href=\"http://projectgado.org/\">Gado scanner</a>.','Afro - Project Description','','inherit','open','open','','1064-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:55:55','2013-04-18 20:55:55','',1064,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1064-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3865,1,'2012-02-12 02:43:37','2012-02-12 02:43:37','[photospace exclude=3556]','Lehigh - Archival Materials','Click on the image above to see a slideshow of some of the archival materials used in the documentary.','inherit','open','open','','1387-revision','','','2012-02-12 02:43:37','2012-02-12 02:43:37','',1387,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1387-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(3866,1,'2012-02-11 22:49:46','2012-02-11 22:49:46','In a world of etiquette and formality, dance cards quickly became indispensable to young women in search of dancing partners. They were a manifestation of etiquette, used to keep social order and help their users follow protocol. Though dance cards are rarely used now, the study of these cards gives a lot of insight into the societies and groups that used them.\n\nLists of etiquette books remain from all different periods, instructing men and women how to act in each particular circumstance. Dancing claims a large portion of many of these books, as it was considered an elegant pastime and a way to judge one\'s character. Dancing was a sign of culture and social class, as the upper class had formal dance training while they were young.\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1341\" class=\"alignright right\" style=\"width: 209px; margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_brand.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1341\" title=\"goucher_student work image3_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_brand-209x250.jpg\" alt=\"Scrapbook page showing in situ location of the U. S. Naval Academy June 2, 1921 Farewell Ball dance card \" width=\"209\" height=\"250\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Scrapbook page showing <em>in situ</em> location of the U. S. Naval Academy June 2, 1921 Farewell Ball dance card with other cards, press clippings, trolley ticket stubs, and other memorabilia, from the scrapbook of Mary Lee Keith (Class of 1924). Goucher College Scrapbook Collection.\n</span></span>\n\nThe dance card furthered one\'s enjoyment of dancing, as it allowed young women to know who they would dance with; they never needed to worry about procuring a partner for the following dance, because he had already signed her card. A practice known as “dating ahead” became quite common as young women began filling out their dance cards in advance of the evening, to ensure that they would not be without a partner. Many women worried about not being asked to dance, as the most beautiful, best dancers were constantly engaged on the dance floor; the women without partners were often looked down on and pitied. Young women feared not having a partner for every dance, and having a dance card allowed them to make sure they would be busy dancing the entire night.\n\nDance cards also provided women with a way to gracefully decline a dance invitation. Johnson points out, “a lady must not decline the invitation of a gentleman to dance, unless she is previously engaged, or does not intend to dance any more during the evening” (79). Having a dance card allowed women to fill out their card with men who they would prefer to dance with, and it also allowed them to gracefully decline a dance by saying her card is full, even though this may not be true.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\nIt was also a way for young women to remember her engagements:\n\nIn the etiquette of the ballroom young ladies should be very careful to keep their promises to their various partners. Little books are furnished as memorizers, and the same honor is imperative here as in greater things. (American Code of Manners 43)\n\nThe dance card acted as a reminder of who she was supposed to dance with for each dance, which helped with confusion in promising multiple dances. The dance card also allowed a convenient excuse when a woman accidentally promised the same dance to two men; she could simply claim that her “programme had got into such a state of confusion” and refrain from offending either party involved (Aldrich 113). After the ball has ended, the dance card can serve as a memento of the event, “Each dance is entered on the program—and many a delightful memory is kept alive by glancing at these names days after the dance is held” (Eichler 97). In this way, the card acts as a reminder both at the ball and after the ball is finished.\n\nDance cards were predominantly used before the 20th century, but certain groups upheld tradition and used them much longer. As Eichler points out in 1922, “The dance program is rarely used now except at college dances, or army and navy dances. It has lost prestige with the passing of the old fashioned ball” (97).\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1344\" class=\"alignright right\" style=\"margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; width: 171px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_brand.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1344\" title=\"goucher_student work image2_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_brand-171x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"171\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"caption\">Sample dance card page with partners for five dances filled in, from the scrapbook of Mary Lee Keith (Class of 1924). Goucher College Scrapbook Collection.</span></span>The Archives and Special Collections at the United States Naval Academy holds an extensive collection of cards from many different events. The Academy, with its emphasis on tradition, used dance cards at their Winter Hops, the Ring Dance and the Farewell Ball into the 1960s. The USNA Archives provides a wonderful example of the evolution of the dance card, through the cards they have from the Farewell Ball, spanning from 1893 to 1976.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\nThe earliest dance card in the collection is from The Farewell Ball, June 2nd 1893 , donated by Mrs. Elizabeth Galt Welles (13 x 8.5 cm). The card is bound by a ribbon bow on the top vertical edge, with heavy cardstock covers in an ivory color. The cover simply states the dance and date in black ink with gold embellishments. The half-inch wide ribbon is long enough for the card to be carried on a lady’s wrist and holds a small pencil 7 cm in length. Inside the cover were 2 pages containing the list of dances with the song titles and composers. The card had not been filled out by its owner. The simple design creates an elegant card, following the guidelines for cards set by The Ballroom Guide published in the 1860s: “modern taste is inclined to favour plain and chaste designs rather than florid” (Aldrich 117). The contents of the card show that the emphasis of the card was on the order of dances, without much information about the ball.\n\nUnfortunately, the Academy does not have any cards from the balls in between 1893 and 1906, but the card from the 1906 Farewell Ball provides a beautiful example of a dance card. Donated by Mrs. Bradford Bartlett, the card is 10 x 7.5 cm with a tan leather cover. The cover has two inside pockets and a strap to attach the card to a woman’s wrist. Inside, the card contains three bifolia with much more decoration than the 1893 card. The card begins with a title page, which announces the name, date, and location of the ball. Following the title page are three pages of dances with spaces for 25 dances. For the first two pages of dances, each recto side holds a space for eight dances and on the verso is an illumination of a woman in an evening gown and a woman in a Navy coat and cover, respectively. The third page lists nine dances on the recto side and lists the committee of midshipmen who planned the ball on the verso. After these there are two blank pages with the word “Autographs” printed at the top of each page. This card—also not filled out—demonstrates the shift in focusing on only the dances to a larger focus on the card as a decorative souvenir.\n\nThe Farewell Ball card from June 5th, 1908 donated by Mary McCarthy is the first in the collection filled out by its original owner. The last names of eight different men are written in pen with a beautiful cursive hand next to the dances. Ms. McCarthy danced 17 of the 25 dances listed and most of them were two steps and waltz, which were especially popular at the time. This card is much like the 1906 card, with a section listing the committee members and blank pages for autographs. Measuring 10 x 7.5 cm, the dark brown suede cover has a Naval Academy insignia blindly stamped in the center, with a dark brown cord and pockets inside the cover. The inside was printed with brown ink and tissue paper protected the pictures from transfer.\n\nIn 1909, the Farewell Ball dance card, donated by Mrs. Bradford Bartlett, remained much the same. The 10.5 x 8 cm card had a navy blue vinyl cover with pockets inside to hold pictures and gold tooling for decoration. The inside contained the order of dances—not filled out—a supper list, and a committee list. The illustrations were in black and white with a small bit of red as an accent.\n\nAlso donated by Mrs. Bradford Bartlett, the Farewell Ball, June 3rd 1910 dance card had a dark grey leather cover with a silver cord (10 x 7 cm). A blind tooled ship decorated the front, and white paint accented the moon and water. Inside, black and white illustrations were accented with the use of yellow, red, blue and green and were protected by tissue paper. The order of dances was filled out in sloppy cursive hand in pencil. The autograph section, however, was left blank.\n\nThe example from the Farewell Ball, June 2nd 1911 provided the most intricate cover. Measuring 11 x 6.5 cm while closed, the tan suede cover folds three times, containing extra pockets. Inside the front cover is one pocket and the small booklet of paper, the back cover extends to twice the front cover’s length, folding in on itself. The right side of the cover has a simple pocket, while the middle of the cover has a more complex pocket. The pocket is vertically arranged, with a flap that closes by inserting the narrow point of the flap into a loop. Naval Academy insignia is stamped onto the inner pockets of the cover. The dance card was attached to the lady’s wrist by a dark brown leather strap, which still holds an 8 cm pencil. Inside contains a title page, pictures with color accents, the committee list, a section for autographs and the order of dances, which is not filled out.\n\nThe Farewell Ball, June 6th 1919 dance card has a navy blue vinyl cover with blind stamped Naval Academy insignia and date and a blue and yellow cord (10 x 8 cm). The inside contains a title page and the dances listed verso and spaces to fill out engagements listed recto. The card is not filled out and is decorated with black and white illustrations.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\nBound vertically in a brown leather cover, the Farewell Ball June 3rd 1920 dance card measures 11 x 7.5 cm. The cover is blind stamped with blue and yellow cords. After the order of dances, there is a calendar from June 1920 to May 1921. The months are listed two at a time, with large pictures above them. The stiff cardstock paper has gilt edges.\n\nThe Farewell Ball June 2nd 1921 dance card has a significantly different cover than the previous cards. The simple 9 x 6.5 cm white cardstock cover has a full color illustration on the cover with an embossed gold Naval Academy insignia. Previously, the covers were made of a more expensive material—usually leather or vinyl. This was the first ball held in Dahlgren Hall, one of the social buildings on the Naval Academy yard. The dances are listed 3 on a page, with no names of the songs, only the types of dances. The dances are not filled out. Next to the type of dance is a space labeled “meet under” and beneath the dances is a space for memories. There is also a different quote at the bottom of each page.\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1343\" class=\"alignright right\" style=\"width: 195px; margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_brand.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1343\" title=\"goucher_student work image1_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_brand-195x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"caption\">Front cover of the U.S. Naval Academy dance card for the June 2, 1921, Farewell Ball, from the scrapbook of Mary Lee Keith (Class of 1924). Goucher College Scrapbook Collection.</span></span>\n\nSimilarly, the Farewell Ball June 2nd 1922 dance card has a white cardstock cover with a color illustration (from Keith Scrapbook, Goucher College Library). The 9 x 6.5 cm cover includes blind stamping and a blue and yellow cord. The layout is very much like the 1921 card, containing a list of dances, with a “meet under” space and space below for memories. This card, however, does not have quotes at the bottom of each page. At the end, there is a committee list. The card is filled out with black pen, and in the “meet under” section, flags are drawn with pen and colored. The ball was held in Dahlgren Hall, like the 1921 card also containing a “meet under” section. Dahlgren Hall is lined with flags on either side of the long, rectangular building. The “meet under” space allowed the women to draw in the flag and know exactly where she was to meet her next dancing partner. This aided even more in making sure that the women had a dance partner for every dance; it ensured that she would always be able to find her intended dance partner even in the crowded room. It is also possible that an escort would fill out the card in advance for his date with the illustrations of flags in order to ensure she danced the night away.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\nIn 1923, the Academy went back to the leather cover for the Farewell Ball dance card. The cover is Navy blue with a gold tooled insignia, with inside pockets (11 x 8.5 cm). The recto pocket had a clear cut out to hold a photograph. For decoration, there are pictures that are whimsical in nature with tissue paper to protect the pictures from transfer. The dances are filled out in immaculately print black pen with flags drawn and colored next to last names.\n\nThe Farewell Ball dance card from 1925 has a silver cardstock cover with a picture of the Naval Academy Chapel dome in different shades of blue. Measuring 9.5 x 6.5 cm, the card contains the order of dances and a “meet under” space, but there is no room to record memories or a committee list like in the 1921, 1922, and 1923 cards. The card is filled out in pen with a shaky hand and the flags are drawn and colored next to the names. On the inside cover recto is a hand drawn cartoon of a midshipman.\n\nThere is a gap until 1942, when the collection resumes with the Farewell Ball, June 18th 1942. It has a white leather cover with stamping and gold accents, measuring 10 x 7.5 cm. The inside is printed in blue and it can be attached to a woman’s wrist by the yellow cord. The card contains a title page and committee list, names the orchestra, and announces that Mrs. John R. Beardall is receiving. The order of dances is filled out in two different shades of blue pen and each name is written in a different style of hand. This indicates another use for the dance card. A woman can hand her card to whoever asks her to dance and have him write in his name. This is very useful, especially if the woman has forgotten his name and can look on the card for a reminder.\n\nLike the 1942 card, the Farewell Ball, June 5th 1945 card was printed with blue ink and has a yellow cord. The 10 x 7.5 cm card has a dark blue faux leather cover with stamping and gold accents. The inside lists who was receiving, the hostesses, committee members and the orchestra. The dances, which are not filled out, are numbered, but there is no information as to what dance or what song each number will be. This shows the diminishing importance of the dances on the dance card.\n\nSimilarly, the Farewell Ball, May 31st 1956 dance card only lists numbers for the dances. This 10 x 7.5 cm card has an off-white cardstock cover with blue ink and an off-white cord. Inside, it lists the title page, orchestra, the woman receiving and the hostesses. It also lists the committee list for both the Farewell Ball and for the other hops held throughout the year. It ends with a quote, “Three cheers for/ those who are about/ to leave us—/ Three cheers for/ those we leave behind/ us—” This quote becomes a standard addition to each following card.\n\nThe card from the Farewell Ball, June 2nd 1959 is much the same as the 1956 card. The 10 x 7.5 cm card has a gold cardstock cover with blue wording and a silhouette of a dancing couple. The cord is also blue. The card lists the orchestra, the woman receiving, the hostesses and the program of dances—numbers only, no types of dances or names of songs. Two of the dances are filled out and the others were left blank. After the dances the card lists the Farewell Ball committee and the Hop committee, which organizes the smaller dances throughout the year. It concludes with the Three Cheers quote found in the 1956 card.\n\nThe cards from the Farewell Balls in 1964, 1965 and 1966 have almost identical contents, with different covers. The 1964 card is 10.5 x 7.5 cm with a white cardstock cover with blue ink and gold embossing and a blue cord. The 1965 card is 11.5 x 9 cm. It has a light blue cover with black embossing and a dark blue cord. The 1966 card measures 11.5 x 9 cm with a light blue cardstock cover with navy blue ink and a navy blue cord. All the cards contain a title page and list the orchestra, woman receiving, officer representative, social director and hostesses. None of the cards are filled out and they are stapled at the fold.\n\nWith each consecutive card, the changes are minimal. The 1967 and 1968 Farewell Ball dance cards are exactly the same, with a different date. They are both 11.5 x 9 cm and their covers are light blue with black ink and a blue cord. Neither card is filled out.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\nThe Farewell Ball June 3rd 1969 card provides a very interesting look at the evolution of the dance card. Very similar to the previous cards, it measures 11.5 x 9cm and lists the title page, orchestra, woman receiving, officer representative, social director, hostesses and committees. It has a white cardstock cover with blue ink and a blue cord. It also includes the Navy “Blue and Gold” song. What it doesn’t include, however, is a program of dances or even a space to write down dance partners. The point of this card is to provide a souvenir of the dance and provide information about it, but it no longer serves a way for women to write down the names of their partners.\n\nThe cards from 1970, 1971 and 1972 are the same as the 1969 card. However, the 1971 card contains one change: the midshipman’s oath appears after the title page. The all have white cardstock covers, 11.5 x 9 cm, with navy blue ink and navy blue cords.\n\nThe Farewell Ball, June 4th 1974 card presents another interesting change in the evolution of the dance card. The card no longer has a cord. The 11 x 9 cm card has a white cardstock cover with blue ink, but no cord with which a lady could attach it to her wrist. The cards from the 1975 and 1976 Farewell Balls have all the same internal elements, but measure 13 x 9 cm with a light blue cardstock cover printed in dark blue ink.\n\nThe progression of the Naval Academy Farewell Ball dance cards shows the decreased emphasis on dance and the move from the dance card as a reminder of the gentleman a woman had promised to dance with to a souvenir and program for the ball. The earlier dance cards contain little information about the ball itself; they focus on the dances, listing the order, the type of dance and the name of the song. Slowly, information is added to the card. In the 1920s, there was a place to write down memories and draw the flag under which the two would meet. These additions keep the focus on the dancing and the use of the dance card as a reminder and as a memento. In the 1940s, the cards begin to list the woman receiving, the committee who planned the ball and other information not directly related to the dancing. Also, the dances are no longer identified by type or name, they are simply numbered. This shows another step away from the focus on dancing. At this stage, the cord also becomes purely decorative. The cords attached to these cards aren’t long enough to secure around a woman’s wrist; they simply add a bit of decoration to the card. By the 1969 and into the 1970s, the dance cards no longer provide space to write the dances. They have transformed into souvenirs from the ball, giving information about the ball and incorporating quotes, song lyrics and lists of the people involved.\n<h5>Works Cited</h5>\n<span class=\"footnote\">Aldrich, Elizabeth. <em>From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance</em>. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991.</span>\n<span class=\"footnote\"><em>The American Code of Manners: a study of the usages, laws and observances which govern intercourse in the best social circles, and of the principles which underlie them</em>. New York: W. R. Andrews, 1880.</span>\n<span class=\"footnote\">Eichler, Lillian. <em>Book of Etiquette</em>. Oyster Bay: Nelson Doubleday Inc., 1922.</span>\n<span class=\"footnote\">Johnson, Sophia Orne. <em>A Manual of Etiquette, with Hints on Politeness and Good Breeding</em>. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885.</span>\n<span class=\"footnote\">Goucher College, Special Collections and Archives. Scrapbook Collection, Mary Lee Keith. Farewell Ball Dance Card, 1922.</span>\n<span class=\"footnote\">The Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy, Special Collections and Archives. Student Life, Dance Card Collection.</span>','My Card Is Full: The Evolution of the Farewell Ball Dance Cards ','In a world of etiquette and formality, dance cards quickly became indispensable to young women in search of dancing partners. They were a manifestation of etiquette, used to keep social order and help their users follow protocol. Though dance cards are rarely used now, the study of these cards gives a lot of insight into the societies and groups that used them.\n\nLists of etiquette books remain from all different periods, instructing men and women how to act in each particular circumstance. Dancing claims a large portion of many of these books, as it was considered an elegant pastime and a way to judge one\'s character. Dancing was a sign of culture and social class, as the upper class had formal dance training while they were young.','inherit','open','open','','1326-revision','','','2012-02-11 22:49:46','2012-02-11 22:49:46','',1326,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1326-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(3867,1,'2012-02-11 21:33:38','2012-02-11 21:33:38','Behind a low glass case in Goucher’s Special Collection Room sits a humble blue book box that holds the first American edition of Jane Austen’s <em>Emma</em>. Valued from nineteen to seventy-five thousand dollars on ABEBooks.com, the edition is unquestionably valuable. But how did this extremely rare copy end up in Goucher’s modest library? In a letter to David Gilson on August 5th, 1967 Alberta Burke revealed that she owned a copy of the 1816 Philadelphia <em>Emma</em>, which formerly belonged to Siegfried Sassoon. The two corresponded from 1967 to 1975 until Alberta fell ill. Throughout this time a steady thread of conversation exists about the Philadelphia Emma.\n\nAfter seeing the interest that both Alberta Burke and David Gilson had in the first American edition of Emma, perusing the pages and studying the tome in detail was essential to discover first hand the majesty of the volumes.\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1319\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"width: 281px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_kendall.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1319  \" title=\"goucher_student work image2_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_kendall-281x250.jpg\" alt=\"First Edition of Emma (1816)\" width=\"281\" height=\"250\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Front pastedown and first flyleaf of the Burke Collection copy of the American first edition of Emma (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816), with the book plates of the Countess of Dalhousie, Frank J. Hogan, and Alberta H. Burke.</span></span>\n\nThe inside of the custom-made blue book box is coated with a light perimeter of oil damage. Nancy Magnuson, one of Goucher’s librarians and liaisons for the Special Collections, said that Alberta Burke felt so attached to the books and bindings in her collections that she oiled the leather twice a year, far more then necessary. The first volume’s brown leather is faded and has been repaired after cracking. On the inside cover are two pasted rectangular cutouts. The first, measuring 3.5cm tall and 8cm wide, reads “Countess of Dalhousie” in delicate black print. The mysterious figure of the Countess Dalhousie intrigued both David Gilson and Alberta Burke. In a letter dated August 15th 1967 Burke wrote, “The Countess of Dalhousie’s signature, but no date, is on the title page. I like to think, most romantically, but with no evidence that she purchased it in new york when she was in Canada with her husband who was governor-general there in 1819.”\n\nFive months later Burke and Gilson are still perplexed by the elusive Countess and her involvement with the edition. On January 12th, 1968 she writes to Gilson hoping to answer the questions he’d had about the 1816 Philadelphia Emma. She notes that over the first half of the page in volume I there is a note in pencil, “not I think in Sasoon’s writing, probably in that of Percy (Mathews) who was the agent who arranged the sale from Mr. Sasoon to Mr. Hogan.” The note, hand-written in pencil that has faded to the extent of being almost translucent, reads “Countess of D- wife to the 9th Earl (1770-1838). Who was Governor of Canada, Nova Scotia, etc 1819-1828- this explains her owning this edition, which was unknown to G. Keynes when he compiled his Bibliography of Jane Austen, 1929.”\n\n<!--nextpage-->\nThese pieces of evidence show that after being published by M. Carey in Philadelphia, this edition left Chesnut Street and most likely traveled into the hands of Lady Dalhousie. “This copy,” Gilson writes in his bibliography of Jane Austen, “was in the present century found in Salisbury by Siegfried Sassoon.”\n\nIn the same letter dated August 15th, 1967 in which she writes to Gilson about her romantic notion that the Countess of Dalhousie purchased Emma when visiting New York, she alludes to another letter involving Siegfried Sassoon. “You may be amused at a sentence from Siegfried Sassoon’s letter to Mr. Percy Elkin Mathews (who arranged the sale of the other 1816 Emma to Mr. Hogan in 1941. G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he wrote saying he must collate it as he wants to write something bout it for the Times Lit Supplement- which is poaching on your preserves, isn’t it?” She writes specifically to Gilson that, “ this is not for quotation in any article, but solely for your own pleasure.” Alberta Burke must have known this would tickle David Gilson’s fancy. Since Gilson first intended to write his bibliography on Jane Austen as a revised edition Geoffrey Keynes’s 1929 bibliography, he would understand Muir’s frustration with people encroaching on his research topic.\n\nBetween the letters from Burke and Gilson and the evidence left behind inside Emma, the provenance of this edition is fairly clear. Emma travels from the Philadelphia publisher to the Countess to Siegfried Sassoon. Inside the first volume of the Emma being examined lays a piece of lavender stationary, measuring 17.6cm tall x 13cm wide, folded in half. Opening it reveals that at the top of the stationary is typed “Heytesbury House, Wiltshire” and at the end of the letter is the minute script signature of Siegfried Sassoon.\n\nThe letter, addressed to Muir, dated March 12th, 1941 is written in Sassoon’s light and witty style. He starts his letter with, “Emma returns to you in a twitter of excitement about going to California. She is sure that Mr. F. Hogan is a very nice man, though she intends to be a bit sharp with him until she gets to know him.” He then jokes with Muir at the expense of Keynes, writing how “G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he wrote saying he must collate it as he wants to write something about it for the Times Lit Supplement- which is poaching on your preserves, isn’t it?”\n\nIn 1941 Sassoon sold the edition through Elkin Mathews to Frank J. Hogan (Gilson, 100). Under the Countess of Dalhousie’s book label is the red leather label of Frank J. Hogan. Around the name in gold lettering it reads “the true university of these days is a collection of books.”\n\nIn addition to the lavender letter from Siegfried Sassoon, two additional correspondences hide between the inside cover and the title page. One letter was written to Mr. Hogan from Mr. Muir relating that the 1816 Philadelphia edition of Emma was on its way. The stationary was that of The Antiquarian Booksellers Association, shown by the stamp on the top right corner. Printed at the top is the name “Elkin Mathews LTD” followed by the director’s names: Greville Worthington, Ian L. Fleming, and P. H. Muir. Underneath the names describes the objects in which these men were interested in: “Rare Books, Manuscripts, Literary Portraits, Music.”\n\n<!--nextpage-->\nLetters leading to other letters seems to be a theme when following this first American edition of Emma. In the letter to Mr. Hogan from Mr. Muir, Muir writes how he feels it is important that Mr. Hogan also get, along with the copy of Emma, the letter from Mr. Sassoon (the lavender letter found in the first volume.) “I think it is only right and proper that you should have with the book the letter that Sassoon sent me when sending the book to me. My own feeling is that one cannot have too much of this kind of thing in association with books.” The truth in Muir’s statement could not be more paramount as it relates to this particular edition of Emma. Burke and Gilson’s letter lead to examining the 1816 Philadelphia edition, which hold the additional correspondences from Sassoon and Muir. Being able to handle and analyze one of the three first American editions is a privilege in itself (Gilson, 100). Yet more than just handling the two volumes, I found the circuit of corresponding materials equally intriguing and helpful to track how the book came from Philadelphia, to the Countess Dalhousie, to Siegfried Sassoon to Frank J. Hogan and finally to Alberta Burke.\n\nThe last letter found inside the first volume relating to Emma’s provenance is from Mr. Muir to Alberta Burke. Muir writes to Alberta on different stationary then when writing to Mr. Hogan, perhaps to add a more personal touch. Typed on yellow paper with the green “Elkin Mathews Ltd” insignia printed at the top, the letter is typed and dated May 22nd, 1945. Mr. Muir writes that Mr. Hogan purchased the first American 1816 Philadelphia edition for Alberta for only 300 dollars. “I congratulate you,” he writes, “on getting it so cheaply. It is exceedingly rare.”\n\nThe last letter from Alberta Burke to David Gilson is dated February 4th, 1975. After this date the Austen letters continue between Alberta’s husband Henry Burke and David Gilson. After Alberta’s death on May 22nd, 1975 Goucher’s library received her Jane Austen collection. According to Goucher’s pamphlet “Twenty-Five Years of Jane Austen,” Alberta had always intended to donate the collection to Goucher. “From the time when my Jane Austen material first began to overflow the one-shelf bounds assigned to it, I have always intended that Goucher should be the ultimate recipient, and I have hoped that, sometime in the future, others would partake of the very great pleasure which they have given me for many years.”\n\nWhen David Gilson in 1982 published A Bibliography of Jane Austen he acknowledged his gratitude to Alberta and Henry Burke. Both Alberta Burke and David Gilson benefited from their letters to one another. Alberta Burke, with her deep seeded love and interest in all things Austen, was able to help David Gilson with his mission to track down Austen texts, study and describe them.\n<h5>Works Cited</h5>\n<div class=\"footnote\">Gilson, David. <em>A Bibliography of Jane Austen</em>. first. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.</div>\n<div class=\"footnote\">Austen, Jane. <em>Emma</em>. First. Philadelphia: M.Carey, 1816.</div>\n<!--nextpage-->\n<h5>Letters From Alberta Burke to David Gilson</h5>\n<ul>\n	<li>“Apartment Stationary” 18.8 cm tall x 25.9 cm wide, written section is 18.8cm tall x 13.1 cm wide, folded into four quarters for mailing, black ink, cream paper, red print of “Apartment 1318 116 West University Parkway Baltimore, Maryland 21210.” Gray and maroon thin stripe border.</li>\n	<li>“Blue Air Mail” 30.5 cm tall x 18.1cm wide, folded into a 9.7cm tall x 14.8cm wide envelope, black ink, written completely on first side and on first fourth and last fourth on other side.</li>\n	<li>“Gray Apartment Stationary” 18.8cm tall x 25.9cm wide, written section is 18.8 cm tall x 13.1 cm wide, folded into four quarters for mailing, black ink, cream paper, gray print of “Apartment 1318 116 West University Parkway Baltimore, Maryland 21210.” Gray thin stripe border.</li>\n	<li>“Small Note Card” 14cm tall x 8.4cm wide, thicker note-card type cream paper, written only on one side, addressed to “Mr. D.J Gilson, J1 Blenheim Drive Oxford OX2 8DL England” Airmail! is written above the address in red marker. “Burke 1318 Broadview Apts. 116 W. University Parkway Baltimore, Maryland 21210” is typed in upper left corner. Written in blue ink.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>August 5, 1967\n</strong><em>Apartment Stationary\n</em>Tells Mr. Gilson that she has the Frank J. Hogan copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma, which formerly belonged to Siegfried Sassoon.\n\n<strong>August 15, 1967\n</strong><em>Apartment Stationary\n</em><em>Written in black fountain pen (script writing), fairly uniform line spacing\n</em>“You may be amused at a sentence from Siegfried Sassoon’s letter to Mr. Percy Elkin Mathews (who arranged the sale of the other 1816 Emma to Mr. Hogan in 1941. “G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he wrote saying he must collate it as he wants to write something bout it for the Times Lit Supplement—which is poaching on your preserves, isn’t it?” This is not for quotation in any article, but solely for your own pleasure.”\n\n“Since my copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma…her signature, but no date, is on the title page) I like to think, most romantically, but with no evidence, that she purchased it as a new work when she was in Canada with her husband who was governor-general there in 1819.”\n\n<strong>January 12, 1968\n</strong><em>Apartment Stationary\n</em>“I hope that I can answer your questions about the Philadelphia 1816 Emma satisfactorily. On inside cover of both volumes is a book place or visiting card (I don’t know which it is) bearing only the engraved words “Coweliers Dalhousie”…no device etc. In the first volume at the left and perpendicular to the lives of priutsey on the title pages is the signature “Cou C Dalhousie” (there is a bit of extra curlicue over the first letter.) However in volume two the signature…is plainly “C B Dalhousie” over the first preliminary half of volume I here is a note in pencil, not I think in Sassoon’s writing, probably in that of Percy (Mathews) who was the agent who arranged the sale from Mr. Sassoon to Mr. Hogan.”\n\n<strong>June 10, 1969\n</strong><em>Blue Air Mail\n</em>“Does Mr. C.B. Hogan’s copy of the 1st Am. E [Emma] conform to the Goodspeed, Boolm Cat. No 317, p.4, 1940 description: “Three vols. In 2…Published by M. Cary. 21 Chestnut St. ….Boston 1816.” I – not sure M. Hogan’s article so can’t collate my copy until his description of his E of my 1st edition is bound(?)”\n\n<strong>November 18, 1969\n</strong><em>Gray Apartment Stationary\n</em>“I was delighted to know of a 3rd (if imperfect copy of the Philadelphia E turning up. When I first read the description of it in Goodspeeds (I think) 1940 catalogue I thought it was some Bookshop.\n#16 went for $1300 to the same buyer\n#17 \" \" 550 \" \" \"\n#18 $40.00\n#19 $35.00\n#20 (The companion to the A--) was valued at $1250 00 by the estate and had a reserve price of $550 which was not reached so that the item was withdrawn.”\n\n<strong>March 11, 1973\n</strong><em>Small Note Card\n</em>“In looking for something else, I picked out a letter of Dr. R.W. Chapurace to me dated 13.10.51. In it he says “The 1816 Philadelphia Emma was the result of Scott’s Quarterly Review, I guess. One day I looked out [the word looks like “whatelup” but this is impossible!] 2 R 1826 and found that it is of a ‘New Edition’ N.A+P that lso is unrecorded.” I haven’t checked further to see if I, or any one else has these listed, and perhaps, I am first causing you unnecessary trouble or being commonly behind the fair.”\n\n<strong>December 16, 1973\n</strong><em>Gray Apartment Stationary\n</em>“The only first in boards which I have which has its labels intact (they match Keynes) is M.P. The E has had the backstrips repaired and the N.A.+P 2 packstrips have crumbled away completely + 2 are very cracked + missing the labels”\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n<h5>Letters from Gilson to Henry Burke (after Alberta falls ill)</h5>\n<ul>\n	<li>“Small White Paper” 17.9cm tall x 13.7cm wide, blue ink, almost transparent white paper, written on only one side.</li>\n	<li>“Blue Air Mail” 30.5 cm tall x 18.1cm wide, folded into a 9.7cm tall x 14.8cm wide envelope, black ink, written completely on first side and on first fourth and last fourth on other side.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>June 14th, 1975\n</strong><em>Blue Air Mail\n</em>“I see that Sotheby’s are selling on 23rd of June “an autograph letter by Jane Austen to her publisher commenting on the review of her novel Emma by Sir Walter Scott”: presumably RWC 127, marked as ‘original not traced’. I suppose the Pierpont Morgan will be bidding for this!”\n\n<strong>August 3rd, 1975\n</strong><em>Small White Paper\n</em>“It would be very kind if you could give me the correct address of Goucher College, and also the name of the librarian whom I should contact with any query relating to Alberta’s books (there may be queries over some of the rarer items, especially the 1816 Philadelphia Emma.)”\n\n<strong>October 16th, 1976\n</strong><em>Small White Pape</em><em>r\n</em><em>Written on both sides.\n</em>“I spent a very interesting morning on 1st September at John Murray in Albemarte Street; they kindly allowed me to see their ledgers, giving the publication costs and other details of the first editions of Emma and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”\n\n<strong>December 26th, 1976\n</strong><em>Small White Paper.\n</em><em>Written on both sides.\n</em>“Miss Jones of Goucher College has very kindly sent me-free of charge- an excellent photograph of the title page of Vol.1 of Alberta’s copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma (my reproduction in the Autumn 1969 Book Collector was from a Xerox of Mr. Hogan’s copy; this photograph is much clearer).”\n\n<strong>March 20th, 1977\n</strong><em>Small White Paper\n</em><em>Written on both sides.\n</em>“Christie’s sold first editions of Emma and of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion on 2nd February- not particularly good copies (from the catalogue descriptions) although with the half-titles in each case; I don’t know who bought them, but they fetched 350 pounds and 230 pounds respectively. I have been given an extremely imperfect copy of the first-edition of Emma, consisting only of Vol.1 (lacking the half-title), and Vol.3 (lacking all before p.19.) It clearly has no commercial value, but still seems worth having.”\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n<h5>Letters Found Inside First Volume of 1816 Philadelphia <em>Emma</em></h5>\n<strong>Letter 1\n</strong><em>17.6cm tall x 13cm wide, grayish blue stationary with “Heytesbury House, Wiltshire” printed on top, dated “12a.3.41,” hand written in script, black ink.</em>\n“Dear Muir,\n‘Emma’ returns to you in a twitter of excitement about ‘going to California.’ She is sure that Mr. F. Hogan is a very nice man though she intends to be a bit sharp with him until she has got to know him.\nSeriously- I am greatly obliged to you and --- agree to your 15% etc, and my wish you are making a bit more out of it. (G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he would say, he ---- collate it as he wants to write something about it for the ----- which his --- on your ---, isn’t it?) ….\nYours, SS (written on top of each other)\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1316\" style=\"width: 250px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_kendall.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1316\" title=\"goucher_student work image3_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_kendall-186x250.jpg\" alt=\"Siegfried Sassoon\'s letter to Percy Muir\" width=\"186\" height=\"250\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Siegfried Sassoon\'s letter to Percy Muir, antiquarian book dealer, regarding Sassoon\'s sale of the American first edition of <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816) to Frank J. Hogan (dated December 3, 1941). The letter was discovered inside the front cover of the Burke Collection copy.</span></span>\n\n<strong>Letter 2</strong>\n<em>“Antiquarian Booksellers Association” stamp on top left, written March 18, 1941 and received April 17, 1941 (received date written in pencil on top right corner,) stationary is of “Elkin Mathews LTD. Directors: Greville Worthington, Ian L. Fleming, and P.H. Muir,” underneath is typed “Rare Books, Manuscripts, Literary Portraits, Music.”</em>\n“Dear Mr. Hogan,\nThis is just a brief note formally to announce the fact that “Emma” left here today on her long journey to California. I think it only right and proper that you should have with the book the letter that Sassoon sent me when sending the book to me. My own feeling is that one cannot have too much of this kind of thing in association with books. I think Siegfried Sassoon a great writer and I would be glad to have this letter myself were I buying one of his books, and I have the feeling that you may think that way, too, so I enclose the letter. He was a great friend and admirer of Charlotte Mew’s, by the way, which may help to endear him to you.\nWith every good wish and kind regards,\nYours very sincerely,\nP. H. MuirHand\nwritten note (in same green ink as Muir’s signature) written below signature of “P.H Muir”:\n“Note the date on SS’s letter, evidently written on 131h”\n\n<strong>Letter 3</strong>\n<em>Yellow paper, green “Elkin Mathews Ltd,” dated May 22, 1945, typed in faded black ink.</em>\n“Dear Mrs. Burke,\nThank you very much indeed for your letter of May 6th. I congratulate you on getting the “Emma” so cheaply. It is exceedingly rare and Mr. Hogan as very glad to pay 300 dollars for it. I mention the price in dollars because at the time he bought it the 1-pound was below par and fluctuating, so that the price was actually quoted in dollars. I say that the price was set by Mr. Sassoon and not by me, but I saw no reason at the time to take exception to it.\nI always have you in mind for any interesting Jane Austen items, which turn up.\nYours very sincerely,\nP.H. Muir (signed in green ink)\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n<h5>Emma (1st Edition Philadelphia 1816)</h5>\n18.3cm tall x 11.1cm (cover)\n\n<em>Inside Cover</em>\ncut and pasted paper of: COUNTESS OF DALHOUSIE, below: maroon and gold sticker of: Ex Libris Frank J. Hogan (around name says: the true university of these days is a collection of books”\n\n<em>Next Page</em>\nwritten by hand in faded pencil: ”Countess of d.- wife of the 9th Earl (1770-1838). Who was Governor of Canada, Nova Scotia, etc. 1819-1828- This explains her owning this edition, which was unknown to G. Keynes when he compiled his Bibliography of Jane Austen, 1929.”\nunder this is the paper square for the “Alberta H. Burke”\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1314\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_kendall.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1314\" title=\"goucher_student work image1_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_kendall-147x250.jpg\" alt=\"American first edition of Jane Austen\'s Emma\" width=\"147\" height=\"250\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Title page of the Burke Collection copy of the American first edition of Jane Austen\'s <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816).</span></span>\n\n<em>Title Page</em>\nEMMA:\nA Novel\nHere Volumes in Two\n(written on side, vertically: A.B. Dallhousie)\nBy the Author of “Pride and Prejudice,”\n&amp;c. &amp;c.\nVol. 1\nPHILADELPHIA:\nPublished by M.Carey, No. 121 Chesnut Street\nAnd for Sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston\n1816\n\n<em>Next Page</em>\nTo his Royal Highness\nThe Prince Regent, This Work Is, By his Royal Highness’s Permission, Most Respectfully Dedicated, By His Royal Highness’s Dutiful and Obedient Humble Servant, The Author.”\n\n<em>First Page of Text</em>\n18cm tall x 9.8cm wide\nA2 at bottom of first page – 8 pages later is “B” (vol.1), 4 pages later “B2”, 8 pages later “C” (vol.1.), 4 pages later “C2”, 8 pages later “D” (vol.1)\naverage full page text block: 12.5cm tall x 7.4cm wide\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n<h5>Letters Found Inside Second Volume</h5>\n<strong>Letter 1</strong>\n<em>21.5cm tall x13.9cm wide, typed: “Charles Sessler Inc.” Established 1882, Bookseller and Printseller 1308 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA. 19107” stationary</em>\n<em> dated April 24, 1967</em>\n“Dear Mr. Burke:\nIn 1945 we purchased in New York at the sale of the Frank J. Hogan Library, item No. 7, a copy of EMMA, printed in Philadelphia by Carey in 1816.\nDo you still have this book and would you be willing to part with it?”\nYours Sincerely,\nMabel Zahn (signed in ink)\nZ.T. in bottom left corner, typed (?)\n\n<strong>Letter 2</strong>\n<em>Typed, same stationary as letter 1</em>\n<em> dated May 3, 1967</em>\n“Dear Mr. Burke:\nThank you so much for your letter of May 1st.\nI am glad that you still have the copy of EMMA. Our inquiry was for a bibliographic purpose. Someone who is working on the bibliography has asked us about the copy we sold you and naturally we followed through for him.\nWith best wishes,\nYours Sincerely,\nMabel Zahn\n-Z.T. in bottom left corner, typed (?)','How Emma Travels: By Letters, Hands and Libraries','Behind a low glass case in Goucher’s Special Collection Room sits a humble blue book box that holds the first American edition of Jane Austen’s Emma. Valued from nineteen to seventy-five thousand dollars on ABEBooks.com, the edition is unquestionably valuable. But how did this extremely rare copy end up in Goucher’s modest library? In a letter to David Gilson on August 5th, 1967 Alberta Burke revealed that she owned a copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma, which formerly belonged to Siegfried Sassoon. The two corresponded from 1967 to 1975 until Alberta fell ill. Throughout this time a steady thread of conversation exists about the Philadelphia Emma.\n\nAfter seeing the interest that both Alberta Burke and David Gilson had in the first American edition of Emma, perusing the pages and studying the tome in detail was essential to discover first hand the majesty of the volumes.','inherit','open','open','','1300-revision','','','2012-02-11 21:33:38','2012-02-11 21:33:38','',1300,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1300-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(3868,1,'2012-02-11 08:45:52','2012-02-11 08:45:52','<div id=\"map3d_dowdle\"></div>\n<div class=\"small light\">Installed Plugin Version: <span id=\"installed-plugin-version\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Loading...</span></div>','Walters - Amazon Dowdle Live','','inherit','open','open','','1209-revision','','','2012-02-11 08:45:52','2012-02-11 08:45:52','',1209,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1209-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(3869,1,'2012-02-11 08:44:05','2012-02-11 08:44:05','<div id=\"map3d_tkacs\"></div>\n<div class=\"small light\">Installed Plugin Version: <span id=\"installed-plugin-version\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Loading...</span></div>','Walters - Romances Casket Tkacs Live','','inherit','open','open','','1205-revision','','','2012-02-11 08:44:05','2012-02-11 08:44:05','',1205,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1205-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(3870,1,'2013-04-18 20:58:39','2013-04-18 20:58:39','<div id=\"map3d_tkacs\"></div>\n<div class=\"small light\">Installed Plugin Version: <span id=\"installed-plugin-version\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Loading...</span></div>','Walters - Romances Casket Tkacs Live','','inherit','open','open','','1205-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:58:39','2013-04-18 20:58:39','',1205,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1205-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3871,1,'2013-04-18 20:58:39','2013-04-18 20:58:39','<div id=\"map3d_dowdle\"></div>\n<div class=\"small light\">Installed Plugin Version: <span id=\"installed-plugin-version\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Loading...</span></div>','Walters - Amazon Dowdle Live','','inherit','open','open','','1209-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:58:39','2013-04-18 20:58:39','',1209,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1209-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3872,1,'2013-04-18 20:58:39','2013-04-18 20:58:39','Behind a low glass case in Goucher’s Special Collection Room sits a humble blue book box that holds the first American edition of Jane Austen’s <em>Emma</em>. Valued from nineteen to seventy-five thousand dollars on ABEBooks.com, the edition is unquestionably valuable. But how did this extremely rare copy end up in Goucher’s modest library? In a letter to David Gilson on August 5th, 1967 Alberta Burke revealed that she owned a copy of the 1816 Philadelphia <em>Emma</em>, which formerly belonged to Siegfried Sassoon. The two corresponded from 1967 to 1975 until Alberta fell ill. Throughout this time a steady thread of conversation exists about the Philadelphia Emma.\n\nAfter seeing the interest that both Alberta Burke and David Gilson had in the first American edition of Emma, perusing the pages and studying the tome in detail was essential to discover first hand the majesty of the volumes.\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1319\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"width: 281px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_kendall.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1319  \" title=\"goucher_student work image2_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_kendall-281x250.jpg\" alt=\"First Edition of Emma (1816)\" width=\"281\" height=\"250\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Front pastedown and first flyleaf of the Burke Collection copy of the American first edition of Emma (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816), with the book plates of the Countess of Dalhousie, Frank J. Hogan, and Alberta H. Burke.</span></span>\n\nThe inside of the custom-made blue book box is coated with a light perimeter of oil damage. Nancy Magnuson, one of Goucher’s librarians and liaisons for the Special Collections, said that Alberta Burke felt so attached to the books and bindings in her collections that she oiled the leather twice a year, far more then necessary. The first volume’s brown leather is faded and has been repaired after cracking. On the inside cover are two pasted rectangular cutouts. The first, measuring 3.5cm tall and 8cm wide, reads “Countess of Dalhousie” in delicate black print. The mysterious figure of the Countess Dalhousie intrigued both David Gilson and Alberta Burke. In a letter dated August 15th 1967 Burke wrote, “The Countess of Dalhousie’s signature, but no date, is on the title page. I like to think, most romantically, but with no evidence that she purchased it in new york when she was in Canada with her husband who was governor-general there in 1819.”\n\nFive months later Burke and Gilson are still perplexed by the elusive Countess and her involvement with the edition. On January 12th, 1968 she writes to Gilson hoping to answer the questions he’d had about the 1816 Philadelphia Emma. She notes that over the first half of the page in volume I there is a note in pencil, “not I think in Sasoon’s writing, probably in that of Percy (Mathews) who was the agent who arranged the sale from Mr. Sasoon to Mr. Hogan.” The note, hand-written in pencil that has faded to the extent of being almost translucent, reads “Countess of D- wife to the 9th Earl (1770-1838). Who was Governor of Canada, Nova Scotia, etc 1819-1828- this explains her owning this edition, which was unknown to G. Keynes when he compiled his Bibliography of Jane Austen, 1929.”\n\n<!--nextpage-->\nThese pieces of evidence show that after being published by M. Carey in Philadelphia, this edition left Chesnut Street and most likely traveled into the hands of Lady Dalhousie. “This copy,” Gilson writes in his bibliography of Jane Austen, “was in the present century found in Salisbury by Siegfried Sassoon.”\n\nIn the same letter dated August 15th, 1967 in which she writes to Gilson about her romantic notion that the Countess of Dalhousie purchased Emma when visiting New York, she alludes to another letter involving Siegfried Sassoon. “You may be amused at a sentence from Siegfried Sassoon’s letter to Mr. Percy Elkin Mathews (who arranged the sale of the other 1816 Emma to Mr. Hogan in 1941. G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he wrote saying he must collate it as he wants to write something bout it for the Times Lit Supplement- which is poaching on your preserves, isn’t it?” She writes specifically to Gilson that, “ this is not for quotation in any article, but solely for your own pleasure.” Alberta Burke must have known this would tickle David Gilson’s fancy. Since Gilson first intended to write his bibliography on Jane Austen as a revised edition Geoffrey Keynes’s 1929 bibliography, he would understand Muir’s frustration with people encroaching on his research topic.\n\nBetween the letters from Burke and Gilson and the evidence left behind inside Emma, the provenance of this edition is fairly clear. Emma travels from the Philadelphia publisher to the Countess to Siegfried Sassoon. Inside the first volume of the Emma being examined lays a piece of lavender stationary, measuring 17.6cm tall x 13cm wide, folded in half. Opening it reveals that at the top of the stationary is typed “Heytesbury House, Wiltshire” and at the end of the letter is the minute script signature of Siegfried Sassoon.\n\nThe letter, addressed to Muir, dated March 12th, 1941 is written in Sassoon’s light and witty style. He starts his letter with, “Emma returns to you in a twitter of excitement about going to California. She is sure that Mr. F. Hogan is a very nice man, though she intends to be a bit sharp with him until she gets to know him.” He then jokes with Muir at the expense of Keynes, writing how “G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he wrote saying he must collate it as he wants to write something about it for the Times Lit Supplement- which is poaching on your preserves, isn’t it?”\n\nIn 1941 Sassoon sold the edition through Elkin Mathews to Frank J. Hogan (Gilson, 100). Under the Countess of Dalhousie’s book label is the red leather label of Frank J. Hogan. Around the name in gold lettering it reads “the true university of these days is a collection of books.”\n\nIn addition to the lavender letter from Siegfried Sassoon, two additional correspondences hide between the inside cover and the title page. One letter was written to Mr. Hogan from Mr. Muir relating that the 1816 Philadelphia edition of Emma was on its way. The stationary was that of The Antiquarian Booksellers Association, shown by the stamp on the top right corner. Printed at the top is the name “Elkin Mathews LTD” followed by the director’s names: Greville Worthington, Ian L. Fleming, and P. H. Muir. Underneath the names describes the objects in which these men were interested in: “Rare Books, Manuscripts, Literary Portraits, Music.”\n\n<!--nextpage-->\nLetters leading to other letters seems to be a theme when following this first American edition of Emma. In the letter to Mr. Hogan from Mr. Muir, Muir writes how he feels it is important that Mr. Hogan also get, along with the copy of Emma, the letter from Mr. Sassoon (the lavender letter found in the first volume.) “I think it is only right and proper that you should have with the book the letter that Sassoon sent me when sending the book to me. My own feeling is that one cannot have too much of this kind of thing in association with books.” The truth in Muir’s statement could not be more paramount as it relates to this particular edition of Emma. Burke and Gilson’s letter lead to examining the 1816 Philadelphia edition, which hold the additional correspondences from Sassoon and Muir. Being able to handle and analyze one of the three first American editions is a privilege in itself (Gilson, 100). Yet more than just handling the two volumes, I found the circuit of corresponding materials equally intriguing and helpful to track how the book came from Philadelphia, to the Countess Dalhousie, to Siegfried Sassoon to Frank J. Hogan and finally to Alberta Burke.\n\nThe last letter found inside the first volume relating to Emma’s provenance is from Mr. Muir to Alberta Burke. Muir writes to Alberta on different stationary then when writing to Mr. Hogan, perhaps to add a more personal touch. Typed on yellow paper with the green “Elkin Mathews Ltd” insignia printed at the top, the letter is typed and dated May 22nd, 1945. Mr. Muir writes that Mr. Hogan purchased the first American 1816 Philadelphia edition for Alberta for only 300 dollars. “I congratulate you,” he writes, “on getting it so cheaply. It is exceedingly rare.”\n\nThe last letter from Alberta Burke to David Gilson is dated February 4th, 1975. After this date the Austen letters continue between Alberta’s husband Henry Burke and David Gilson. After Alberta’s death on May 22nd, 1975 Goucher’s library received her Jane Austen collection. According to Goucher’s pamphlet “Twenty-Five Years of Jane Austen,” Alberta had always intended to donate the collection to Goucher. “From the time when my Jane Austen material first began to overflow the one-shelf bounds assigned to it, I have always intended that Goucher should be the ultimate recipient, and I have hoped that, sometime in the future, others would partake of the very great pleasure which they have given me for many years.”\n\nWhen David Gilson in 1982 published A Bibliography of Jane Austen he acknowledged his gratitude to Alberta and Henry Burke. Both Alberta Burke and David Gilson benefited from their letters to one another. Alberta Burke, with her deep seeded love and interest in all things Austen, was able to help David Gilson with his mission to track down Austen texts, study and describe them.\n<h5>Works Cited</h5>\n<div class=\"footnote\">Gilson, David. <em>A Bibliography of Jane Austen</em>. first. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.</div>\n<div class=\"footnote\">Austen, Jane. <em>Emma</em>. First. Philadelphia: M.Carey, 1816.</div>\n<!--nextpage-->\n<h5>Letters From Alberta Burke to David Gilson</h5>\n<ul>\n	<li>“Apartment Stationary” 18.8 cm tall x 25.9 cm wide, written section is 18.8cm tall x 13.1 cm wide, folded into four quarters for mailing, black ink, cream paper, red print of “Apartment 1318 116 West University Parkway Baltimore, Maryland 21210.” Gray and maroon thin stripe border.</li>\n	<li>“Blue Air Mail” 30.5 cm tall x 18.1cm wide, folded into a 9.7cm tall x 14.8cm wide envelope, black ink, written completely on first side and on first fourth and last fourth on other side.</li>\n	<li>“Gray Apartment Stationary” 18.8cm tall x 25.9cm wide, written section is 18.8 cm tall x 13.1 cm wide, folded into four quarters for mailing, black ink, cream paper, gray print of “Apartment 1318 116 West University Parkway Baltimore, Maryland 21210.” Gray thin stripe border.</li>\n	<li>“Small Note Card” 14cm tall x 8.4cm wide, thicker note-card type cream paper, written only on one side, addressed to “Mr. D.J Gilson, J1 Blenheim Drive Oxford OX2 8DL England” Airmail! is written above the address in red marker. “Burke 1318 Broadview Apts. 116 W. University Parkway Baltimore, Maryland 21210” is typed in upper left corner. Written in blue ink.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>August 5, 1967\n</strong><em>Apartment Stationary\n</em>Tells Mr. Gilson that she has the Frank J. Hogan copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma, which formerly belonged to Siegfried Sassoon.\n\n<strong>August 15, 1967\n</strong><em>Apartment Stationary\n</em><em>Written in black fountain pen (script writing), fairly uniform line spacing\n</em>“You may be amused at a sentence from Siegfried Sassoon’s letter to Mr. Percy Elkin Mathews (who arranged the sale of the other 1816 Emma to Mr. Hogan in 1941. “G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he wrote saying he must collate it as he wants to write something bout it for the Times Lit Supplement—which is poaching on your preserves, isn’t it?” This is not for quotation in any article, but solely for your own pleasure.”\n\n“Since my copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma…her signature, but no date, is on the title page) I like to think, most romantically, but with no evidence, that she purchased it as a new work when she was in Canada with her husband who was governor-general there in 1819.”\n\n<strong>January 12, 1968\n</strong><em>Apartment Stationary\n</em>“I hope that I can answer your questions about the Philadelphia 1816 Emma satisfactorily. On inside cover of both volumes is a book place or visiting card (I don’t know which it is) bearing only the engraved words “Coweliers Dalhousie”…no device etc. In the first volume at the left and perpendicular to the lives of priutsey on the title pages is the signature “Cou C Dalhousie” (there is a bit of extra curlicue over the first letter.) However in volume two the signature…is plainly “C B Dalhousie” over the first preliminary half of volume I here is a note in pencil, not I think in Sassoon’s writing, probably in that of Percy (Mathews) who was the agent who arranged the sale from Mr. Sassoon to Mr. Hogan.”\n\n<strong>June 10, 1969\n</strong><em>Blue Air Mail\n</em>“Does Mr. C.B. Hogan’s copy of the 1st Am. E [Emma] conform to the Goodspeed, Boolm Cat. No 317, p.4, 1940 description: “Three vols. In 2…Published by M. Cary. 21 Chestnut St. ….Boston 1816.” I – not sure M. Hogan’s article so can’t collate my copy until his description of his E of my 1st edition is bound(?)”\n\n<strong>November 18, 1969\n</strong><em>Gray Apartment Stationary\n</em>“I was delighted to know of a 3rd (if imperfect copy of the Philadelphia E turning up. When I first read the description of it in Goodspeeds (I think) 1940 catalogue I thought it was some Bookshop.\n#16 went for $1300 to the same buyer\n#17 \" \" 550 \" \" \"\n#18 $40.00\n#19 $35.00\n#20 (The companion to the A--) was valued at $1250 00 by the estate and had a reserve price of $550 which was not reached so that the item was withdrawn.”\n\n<strong>March 11, 1973\n</strong><em>Small Note Card\n</em>“In looking for something else, I picked out a letter of Dr. R.W. Chapurace to me dated 13.10.51. In it he says “The 1816 Philadelphia Emma was the result of Scott’s Quarterly Review, I guess. One day I looked out [the word looks like “whatelup” but this is impossible!] 2 R 1826 and found that it is of a ‘New Edition’ N.A+P that lso is unrecorded.” I haven’t checked further to see if I, or any one else has these listed, and perhaps, I am first causing you unnecessary trouble or being commonly behind the fair.”\n\n<strong>December 16, 1973\n</strong><em>Gray Apartment Stationary\n</em>“The only first in boards which I have which has its labels intact (they match Keynes) is M.P. The E has had the backstrips repaired and the N.A.+P 2 packstrips have crumbled away completely + 2 are very cracked + missing the labels”\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n<h5>Letters from Gilson to Henry Burke (after Alberta falls ill)</h5>\n<ul>\n	<li>“Small White Paper” 17.9cm tall x 13.7cm wide, blue ink, almost transparent white paper, written on only one side.</li>\n	<li>“Blue Air Mail” 30.5 cm tall x 18.1cm wide, folded into a 9.7cm tall x 14.8cm wide envelope, black ink, written completely on first side and on first fourth and last fourth on other side.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>June 14th, 1975\n</strong><em>Blue Air Mail\n</em>“I see that Sotheby’s are selling on 23rd of June “an autograph letter by Jane Austen to her publisher commenting on the review of her novel Emma by Sir Walter Scott”: presumably RWC 127, marked as ‘original not traced’. I suppose the Pierpont Morgan will be bidding for this!”\n\n<strong>August 3rd, 1975\n</strong><em>Small White Paper\n</em>“It would be very kind if you could give me the correct address of Goucher College, and also the name of the librarian whom I should contact with any query relating to Alberta’s books (there may be queries over some of the rarer items, especially the 1816 Philadelphia Emma.)”\n\n<strong>October 16th, 1976\n</strong><em>Small White Pape</em><em>r\n</em><em>Written on both sides.\n</em>“I spent a very interesting morning on 1st September at John Murray in Albemarte Street; they kindly allowed me to see their ledgers, giving the publication costs and other details of the first editions of Emma and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”\n\n<strong>December 26th, 1976\n</strong><em>Small White Paper.\n</em><em>Written on both sides.\n</em>“Miss Jones of Goucher College has very kindly sent me-free of charge- an excellent photograph of the title page of Vol.1 of Alberta’s copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma (my reproduction in the Autumn 1969 Book Collector was from a Xerox of Mr. Hogan’s copy; this photograph is much clearer).”\n\n<strong>March 20th, 1977\n</strong><em>Small White Paper\n</em><em>Written on both sides.\n</em>“Christie’s sold first editions of Emma and of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion on 2nd February- not particularly good copies (from the catalogue descriptions) although with the half-titles in each case; I don’t know who bought them, but they fetched 350 pounds and 230 pounds respectively. I have been given an extremely imperfect copy of the first-edition of Emma, consisting only of Vol.1 (lacking the half-title), and Vol.3 (lacking all before p.19.) It clearly has no commercial value, but still seems worth having.”\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n<h5>Letters Found Inside First Volume of 1816 Philadelphia <em>Emma</em></h5>\n<strong>Letter 1\n</strong><em>17.6cm tall x 13cm wide, grayish blue stationary with “Heytesbury House, Wiltshire” printed on top, dated “12a.3.41,” hand written in script, black ink.</em>\n“Dear Muir,\n‘Emma’ returns to you in a twitter of excitement about ‘going to California.’ She is sure that Mr. F. Hogan is a very nice man though she intends to be a bit sharp with him until she has got to know him.\nSeriously- I am greatly obliged to you and --- agree to your 15% etc, and my wish you are making a bit more out of it. (G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he would say, he ---- collate it as he wants to write something about it for the ----- which his --- on your ---, isn’t it?) ….\nYours, SS (written on top of each other)\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1316\" style=\"width: 250px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_kendall.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1316\" title=\"goucher_student work image3_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_kendall-186x250.jpg\" alt=\"Siegfried Sassoon\'s letter to Percy Muir\" width=\"186\" height=\"250\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Siegfried Sassoon\'s letter to Percy Muir, antiquarian book dealer, regarding Sassoon\'s sale of the American first edition of <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816) to Frank J. Hogan (dated December 3, 1941). The letter was discovered inside the front cover of the Burke Collection copy.</span></span>\n\n<strong>Letter 2</strong>\n<em>“Antiquarian Booksellers Association” stamp on top left, written March 18, 1941 and received April 17, 1941 (received date written in pencil on top right corner,) stationary is of “Elkin Mathews LTD. Directors: Greville Worthington, Ian L. Fleming, and P.H. Muir,” underneath is typed “Rare Books, Manuscripts, Literary Portraits, Music.”</em>\n“Dear Mr. Hogan,\nThis is just a brief note formally to announce the fact that “Emma” left here today on her long journey to California. I think it only right and proper that you should have with the book the letter that Sassoon sent me when sending the book to me. My own feeling is that one cannot have too much of this kind of thing in association with books. I think Siegfried Sassoon a great writer and I would be glad to have this letter myself were I buying one of his books, and I have the feeling that you may think that way, too, so I enclose the letter. He was a great friend and admirer of Charlotte Mew’s, by the way, which may help to endear him to you.\nWith every good wish and kind regards,\nYours very sincerely,\nP. H. MuirHand\nwritten note (in same green ink as Muir’s signature) written below signature of “P.H Muir”:\n“Note the date on SS’s letter, evidently written on 131h”\n\n<strong>Letter 3</strong>\n<em>Yellow paper, green “Elkin Mathews Ltd,” dated May 22, 1945, typed in faded black ink.</em>\n“Dear Mrs. Burke,\nThank you very much indeed for your letter of May 6th. I congratulate you on getting the “Emma” so cheaply. It is exceedingly rare and Mr. Hogan as very glad to pay 300 dollars for it. I mention the price in dollars because at the time he bought it the 1-pound was below par and fluctuating, so that the price was actually quoted in dollars. I say that the price was set by Mr. Sassoon and not by me, but I saw no reason at the time to take exception to it.\nI always have you in mind for any interesting Jane Austen items, which turn up.\nYours very sincerely,\nP.H. Muir (signed in green ink)\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n<h5>Emma (1st Edition Philadelphia 1816)</h5>\n18.3cm tall x 11.1cm (cover)\n\n<em>Inside Cover</em>\ncut and pasted paper of: COUNTESS OF DALHOUSIE, below: maroon and gold sticker of: Ex Libris Frank J. Hogan (around name says: the true university of these days is a collection of books”\n\n<em>Next Page</em>\nwritten by hand in faded pencil: ”Countess of d.- wife of the 9th Earl (1770-1838). Who was Governor of Canada, Nova Scotia, etc. 1819-1828- This explains her owning this edition, which was unknown to G. Keynes when he compiled his Bibliography of Jane Austen, 1929.”\nunder this is the paper square for the “Alberta H. Burke”\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1314\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_kendall.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1314\" title=\"goucher_student work image1_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_kendall-147x250.jpg\" alt=\"American first edition of Jane Austen\'s Emma\" width=\"147\" height=\"250\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Title page of the Burke Collection copy of the American first edition of Jane Austen\'s <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816).</span></span>\n\n<em>Title Page</em>\nEMMA:\nA Novel\nHere Volumes in Two\n(written on side, vertically: A.B. Dallhousie)\nBy the Author of “Pride and Prejudice,”\n&amp;c. &amp;c.\nVol. 1\nPHILADELPHIA:\nPublished by M.Carey, No. 121 Chesnut Street\nAnd for Sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston\n1816\n\n<em>Next Page</em>\nTo his Royal Highness\nThe Prince Regent, This Work Is, By his Royal Highness’s Permission, Most Respectfully Dedicated, By His Royal Highness’s Dutiful and Obedient Humble Servant, The Author.”\n\n<em>First Page of Text</em>\n18cm tall x 9.8cm wide\nA2 at bottom of first page – 8 pages later is “B” (vol.1), 4 pages later “B2”, 8 pages later “C” (vol.1.), 4 pages later “C2”, 8 pages later “D” (vol.1)\naverage full page text block: 12.5cm tall x 7.4cm wide\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n<h5>Letters Found Inside Second Volume</h5>\n<strong>Letter 1</strong>\n<em>21.5cm tall x13.9cm wide, typed: “Charles Sessler Inc.” Established 1882, Bookseller and Printseller 1308 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA. 19107” stationary</em>\n<em> dated April 24, 1967</em>\n“Dear Mr. Burke:\nIn 1945 we purchased in New York at the sale of the Frank J. Hogan Library, item No. 7, a copy of EMMA, printed in Philadelphia by Carey in 1816.\nDo you still have this book and would you be willing to part with it?”\nYours Sincerely,\nMabel Zahn (signed in ink)\nZ.T. in bottom left corner, typed (?)\n\n<strong>Letter 2</strong>\n<em>Typed, same stationary as letter 1</em>\n<em> dated May 3, 1967</em>\n“Dear Mr. Burke:\nThank you so much for your letter of May 1st.\nI am glad that you still have the copy of EMMA. Our inquiry was for a bibliographic purpose. Someone who is working on the bibliography has asked us about the copy we sold you and naturally we followed through for him.\nWith best wishes,\nYours Sincerely,\nMabel Zahn\n-Z.T. in bottom left corner, typed (?)','How Emma Travels: By Letters, Hands and Libraries','Behind a low glass case in Goucher’s Special Collection Room sits a humble blue book box that holds the first American edition of Jane Austen’s Emma. Valued from nineteen to seventy-five thousand dollars on ABEBooks.com, the edition is unquestionably valuable. But how did this extremely rare copy end up in Goucher’s modest library? In a letter to David Gilson on August 5th, 1967 Alberta Burke revealed that she owned a copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma, which formerly belonged to Siegfried Sassoon. The two corresponded from 1967 to 1975 until Alberta fell ill. Throughout this time a steady thread of conversation exists about the Philadelphia Emma.\n\nAfter seeing the interest that both Alberta Burke and David Gilson had in the first American edition of Emma, perusing the pages and studying the tome in detail was essential to discover first hand the majesty of the volumes.','inherit','open','open','','1300-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:58:39','2013-04-18 20:58:39','',1300,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1300-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3873,1,'2013-04-18 20:58:39','2013-04-18 20:58:39','In a world of etiquette and formality, dance cards quickly became indispensable to young women in search of dancing partners. They were a manifestation of etiquette, used to keep social order and help their users follow protocol. Though dance cards are rarely used now, the study of these cards gives a lot of insight into the societies and groups that used them.\n\nLists of etiquette books remain from all different periods, instructing men and women how to act in each particular circumstance. Dancing claims a large portion of many of these books, as it was considered an elegant pastime and a way to judge one\'s character. Dancing was a sign of culture and social class, as the upper class had formal dance training while they were young.\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1341\" class=\"alignright right\" style=\"width: 209px; margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_brand.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1341\" title=\"goucher_student work image3_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_brand-209x250.jpg\" alt=\"Scrapbook page showing in situ location of the U. S. Naval Academy June 2, 1921 Farewell Ball dance card \" width=\"209\" height=\"250\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Scrapbook page showing <em>in situ</em> location of the U. S. Naval Academy June 2, 1921 Farewell Ball dance card with other cards, press clippings, trolley ticket stubs, and other memorabilia, from the scrapbook of Mary Lee Keith (Class of 1924). Goucher College Scrapbook Collection.\n</span></span>\n\nThe dance card furthered one\'s enjoyment of dancing, as it allowed young women to know who they would dance with; they never needed to worry about procuring a partner for the following dance, because he had already signed her card. A practice known as “dating ahead” became quite common as young women began filling out their dance cards in advance of the evening, to ensure that they would not be without a partner. Many women worried about not being asked to dance, as the most beautiful, best dancers were constantly engaged on the dance floor; the women without partners were often looked down on and pitied. Young women feared not having a partner for every dance, and having a dance card allowed them to make sure they would be busy dancing the entire night.\n\nDance cards also provided women with a way to gracefully decline a dance invitation. Johnson points out, “a lady must not decline the invitation of a gentleman to dance, unless she is previously engaged, or does not intend to dance any more during the evening” (79). Having a dance card allowed women to fill out their card with men who they would prefer to dance with, and it also allowed them to gracefully decline a dance by saying her card is full, even though this may not be true.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\nIt was also a way for young women to remember her engagements:\n\nIn the etiquette of the ballroom young ladies should be very careful to keep their promises to their various partners. Little books are furnished as memorizers, and the same honor is imperative here as in greater things. (American Code of Manners 43)\n\nThe dance card acted as a reminder of who she was supposed to dance with for each dance, which helped with confusion in promising multiple dances. The dance card also allowed a convenient excuse when a woman accidentally promised the same dance to two men; she could simply claim that her “programme had got into such a state of confusion” and refrain from offending either party involved (Aldrich 113). After the ball has ended, the dance card can serve as a memento of the event, “Each dance is entered on the program—and many a delightful memory is kept alive by glancing at these names days after the dance is held” (Eichler 97). In this way, the card acts as a reminder both at the ball and after the ball is finished.\n\nDance cards were predominantly used before the 20th century, but certain groups upheld tradition and used them much longer. As Eichler points out in 1922, “The dance program is rarely used now except at college dances, or army and navy dances. It has lost prestige with the passing of the old fashioned ball” (97).\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1344\" class=\"alignright right\" style=\"margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; width: 171px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_brand.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1344\" title=\"goucher_student work image2_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_brand-171x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"171\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"caption\">Sample dance card page with partners for five dances filled in, from the scrapbook of Mary Lee Keith (Class of 1924). Goucher College Scrapbook Collection.</span></span>The Archives and Special Collections at the United States Naval Academy holds an extensive collection of cards from many different events. The Academy, with its emphasis on tradition, used dance cards at their Winter Hops, the Ring Dance and the Farewell Ball into the 1960s. The USNA Archives provides a wonderful example of the evolution of the dance card, through the cards they have from the Farewell Ball, spanning from 1893 to 1976.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\nThe earliest dance card in the collection is from The Farewell Ball, June 2nd 1893 , donated by Mrs. Elizabeth Galt Welles (13 x 8.5 cm). The card is bound by a ribbon bow on the top vertical edge, with heavy cardstock covers in an ivory color. The cover simply states the dance and date in black ink with gold embellishments. The half-inch wide ribbon is long enough for the card to be carried on a lady’s wrist and holds a small pencil 7 cm in length. Inside the cover were 2 pages containing the list of dances with the song titles and composers. The card had not been filled out by its owner. The simple design creates an elegant card, following the guidelines for cards set by The Ballroom Guide published in the 1860s: “modern taste is inclined to favour plain and chaste designs rather than florid” (Aldrich 117). The contents of the card show that the emphasis of the card was on the order of dances, without much information about the ball.\n\nUnfortunately, the Academy does not have any cards from the balls in between 1893 and 1906, but the card from the 1906 Farewell Ball provides a beautiful example of a dance card. Donated by Mrs. Bradford Bartlett, the card is 10 x 7.5 cm with a tan leather cover. The cover has two inside pockets and a strap to attach the card to a woman’s wrist. Inside, the card contains three bifolia with much more decoration than the 1893 card. The card begins with a title page, which announces the name, date, and location of the ball. Following the title page are three pages of dances with spaces for 25 dances. For the first two pages of dances, each recto side holds a space for eight dances and on the verso is an illumination of a woman in an evening gown and a woman in a Navy coat and cover, respectively. The third page lists nine dances on the recto side and lists the committee of midshipmen who planned the ball on the verso. After these there are two blank pages with the word “Autographs” printed at the top of each page. This card—also not filled out—demonstrates the shift in focusing on only the dances to a larger focus on the card as a decorative souvenir.\n\nThe Farewell Ball card from June 5th, 1908 donated by Mary McCarthy is the first in the collection filled out by its original owner. The last names of eight different men are written in pen with a beautiful cursive hand next to the dances. Ms. McCarthy danced 17 of the 25 dances listed and most of them were two steps and waltz, which were especially popular at the time. This card is much like the 1906 card, with a section listing the committee members and blank pages for autographs. Measuring 10 x 7.5 cm, the dark brown suede cover has a Naval Academy insignia blindly stamped in the center, with a dark brown cord and pockets inside the cover. The inside was printed with brown ink and tissue paper protected the pictures from transfer.\n\nIn 1909, the Farewell Ball dance card, donated by Mrs. Bradford Bartlett, remained much the same. The 10.5 x 8 cm card had a navy blue vinyl cover with pockets inside to hold pictures and gold tooling for decoration. The inside contained the order of dances—not filled out—a supper list, and a committee list. The illustrations were in black and white with a small bit of red as an accent.\n\nAlso donated by Mrs. Bradford Bartlett, the Farewell Ball, June 3rd 1910 dance card had a dark grey leather cover with a silver cord (10 x 7 cm). A blind tooled ship decorated the front, and white paint accented the moon and water. Inside, black and white illustrations were accented with the use of yellow, red, blue and green and were protected by tissue paper. The order of dances was filled out in sloppy cursive hand in pencil. The autograph section, however, was left blank.\n\nThe example from the Farewell Ball, June 2nd 1911 provided the most intricate cover. Measuring 11 x 6.5 cm while closed, the tan suede cover folds three times, containing extra pockets. Inside the front cover is one pocket and the small booklet of paper, the back cover extends to twice the front cover’s length, folding in on itself. The right side of the cover has a simple pocket, while the middle of the cover has a more complex pocket. The pocket is vertically arranged, with a flap that closes by inserting the narrow point of the flap into a loop. Naval Academy insignia is stamped onto the inner pockets of the cover. The dance card was attached to the lady’s wrist by a dark brown leather strap, which still holds an 8 cm pencil. Inside contains a title page, pictures with color accents, the committee list, a section for autographs and the order of dances, which is not filled out.\n\nThe Farewell Ball, June 6th 1919 dance card has a navy blue vinyl cover with blind stamped Naval Academy insignia and date and a blue and yellow cord (10 x 8 cm). The inside contains a title page and the dances listed verso and spaces to fill out engagements listed recto. The card is not filled out and is decorated with black and white illustrations.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\nBound vertically in a brown leather cover, the Farewell Ball June 3rd 1920 dance card measures 11 x 7.5 cm. The cover is blind stamped with blue and yellow cords. After the order of dances, there is a calendar from June 1920 to May 1921. The months are listed two at a time, with large pictures above them. The stiff cardstock paper has gilt edges.\n\nThe Farewell Ball June 2nd 1921 dance card has a significantly different cover than the previous cards. The simple 9 x 6.5 cm white cardstock cover has a full color illustration on the cover with an embossed gold Naval Academy insignia. Previously, the covers were made of a more expensive material—usually leather or vinyl. This was the first ball held in Dahlgren Hall, one of the social buildings on the Naval Academy yard. The dances are listed 3 on a page, with no names of the songs, only the types of dances. The dances are not filled out. Next to the type of dance is a space labeled “meet under” and beneath the dances is a space for memories. There is also a different quote at the bottom of each page.\n\n<span id=\"attachment_1343\" class=\"alignright right\" style=\"width: 195px; margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_brand.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1343\" title=\"goucher_student work image1_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_brand-195x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"caption\">Front cover of the U.S. Naval Academy dance card for the June 2, 1921, Farewell Ball, from the scrapbook of Mary Lee Keith (Class of 1924). Goucher College Scrapbook Collection.</span></span>\n\nSimilarly, the Farewell Ball June 2nd 1922 dance card has a white cardstock cover with a color illustration (from Keith Scrapbook, Goucher College Library). The 9 x 6.5 cm cover includes blind stamping and a blue and yellow cord. The layout is very much like the 1921 card, containing a list of dances, with a “meet under” space and space below for memories. This card, however, does not have quotes at the bottom of each page. At the end, there is a committee list. The card is filled out with black pen, and in the “meet under” section, flags are drawn with pen and colored. The ball was held in Dahlgren Hall, like the 1921 card also containing a “meet under” section. Dahlgren Hall is lined with flags on either side of the long, rectangular building. The “meet under” space allowed the women to draw in the flag and know exactly where she was to meet her next dancing partner. This aided even more in making sure that the women had a dance partner for every dance; it ensured that she would always be able to find her intended dance partner even in the crowded room. It is also possible that an escort would fill out the card in advance for his date with the illustrations of flags in order to ensure she danced the night away.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\nIn 1923, the Academy went back to the leather cover for the Farewell Ball dance card. The cover is Navy blue with a gold tooled insignia, with inside pockets (11 x 8.5 cm). The recto pocket had a clear cut out to hold a photograph. For decoration, there are pictures that are whimsical in nature with tissue paper to protect the pictures from transfer. The dances are filled out in immaculately print black pen with flags drawn and colored next to last names.\n\nThe Farewell Ball dance card from 1925 has a silver cardstock cover with a picture of the Naval Academy Chapel dome in different shades of blue. Measuring 9.5 x 6.5 cm, the card contains the order of dances and a “meet under” space, but there is no room to record memories or a committee list like in the 1921, 1922, and 1923 cards. The card is filled out in pen with a shaky hand and the flags are drawn and colored next to the names. On the inside cover recto is a hand drawn cartoon of a midshipman.\n\nThere is a gap until 1942, when the collection resumes with the Farewell Ball, June 18th 1942. It has a white leather cover with stamping and gold accents, measuring 10 x 7.5 cm. The inside is printed in blue and it can be attached to a woman’s wrist by the yellow cord. The card contains a title page and committee list, names the orchestra, and announces that Mrs. John R. Beardall is receiving. The order of dances is filled out in two different shades of blue pen and each name is written in a different style of hand. This indicates another use for the dance card. A woman can hand her card to whoever asks her to dance and have him write in his name. This is very useful, especially if the woman has forgotten his name and can look on the card for a reminder.\n\nLike the 1942 card, the Farewell Ball, June 5th 1945 card was printed with blue ink and has a yellow cord. The 10 x 7.5 cm card has a dark blue faux leather cover with stamping and gold accents. The inside lists who was receiving, the hostesses, committee members and the orchestra. The dances, which are not filled out, are numbered, but there is no information as to what dance or what song each number will be. This shows the diminishing importance of the dances on the dance card.\n\nSimilarly, the Farewell Ball, May 31st 1956 dance card only lists numbers for the dances. This 10 x 7.5 cm card has an off-white cardstock cover with blue ink and an off-white cord. Inside, it lists the title page, orchestra, the woman receiving and the hostesses. It also lists the committee list for both the Farewell Ball and for the other hops held throughout the year. It ends with a quote, “Three cheers for/ those who are about/ to leave us—/ Three cheers for/ those we leave behind/ us—” This quote becomes a standard addition to each following card.\n\nThe card from the Farewell Ball, June 2nd 1959 is much the same as the 1956 card. The 10 x 7.5 cm card has a gold cardstock cover with blue wording and a silhouette of a dancing couple. The cord is also blue. The card lists the orchestra, the woman receiving, the hostesses and the program of dances—numbers only, no types of dances or names of songs. Two of the dances are filled out and the others were left blank. After the dances the card lists the Farewell Ball committee and the Hop committee, which organizes the smaller dances throughout the year. It concludes with the Three Cheers quote found in the 1956 card.\n\nThe cards from the Farewell Balls in 1964, 1965 and 1966 have almost identical contents, with different covers. The 1964 card is 10.5 x 7.5 cm with a white cardstock cover with blue ink and gold embossing and a blue cord. The 1965 card is 11.5 x 9 cm. It has a light blue cover with black embossing and a dark blue cord. The 1966 card measures 11.5 x 9 cm with a light blue cardstock cover with navy blue ink and a navy blue cord. All the cards contain a title page and list the orchestra, woman receiving, officer representative, social director and hostesses. None of the cards are filled out and they are stapled at the fold.\n\nWith each consecutive card, the changes are minimal. The 1967 and 1968 Farewell Ball dance cards are exactly the same, with a different date. They are both 11.5 x 9 cm and their covers are light blue with black ink and a blue cord. Neither card is filled out.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\nThe Farewell Ball June 3rd 1969 card provides a very interesting look at the evolution of the dance card. Very similar to the previous cards, it measures 11.5 x 9cm and lists the title page, orchestra, woman receiving, officer representative, social director, hostesses and committees. It has a white cardstock cover with blue ink and a blue cord. It also includes the Navy “Blue and Gold” song. What it doesn’t include, however, is a program of dances or even a space to write down dance partners. The point of this card is to provide a souvenir of the dance and provide information about it, but it no longer serves a way for women to write down the names of their partners.\n\nThe cards from 1970, 1971 and 1972 are the same as the 1969 card. However, the 1971 card contains one change: the midshipman’s oath appears after the title page. The all have white cardstock covers, 11.5 x 9 cm, with navy blue ink and navy blue cords.\n\nThe Farewell Ball, June 4th 1974 card presents another interesting change in the evolution of the dance card. The card no longer has a cord. The 11 x 9 cm card has a white cardstock cover with blue ink, but no cord with which a lady could attach it to her wrist. The cards from the 1975 and 1976 Farewell Balls have all the same internal elements, but measure 13 x 9 cm with a light blue cardstock cover printed in dark blue ink.\n\nThe progression of the Naval Academy Farewell Ball dance cards shows the decreased emphasis on dance and the move from the dance card as a reminder of the gentleman a woman had promised to dance with to a souvenir and program for the ball. The earlier dance cards contain little information about the ball itself; they focus on the dances, listing the order, the type of dance and the name of the song. Slowly, information is added to the card. In the 1920s, there was a place to write down memories and draw the flag under which the two would meet. These additions keep the focus on the dancing and the use of the dance card as a reminder and as a memento. In the 1940s, the cards begin to list the woman receiving, the committee who planned the ball and other information not directly related to the dancing. Also, the dances are no longer identified by type or name, they are simply numbered. This shows another step away from the focus on dancing. At this stage, the cord also becomes purely decorative. The cords attached to these cards aren’t long enough to secure around a woman’s wrist; they simply add a bit of decoration to the card. By the 1969 and into the 1970s, the dance cards no longer provide space to write the dances. They have transformed into souvenirs from the ball, giving information about the ball and incorporating quotes, song lyrics and lists of the people involved.\n<h5>Works Cited</h5>\n<span class=\"footnote\">Aldrich, Elizabeth. <em>From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance</em>. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991.</span>\n<span class=\"footnote\"><em>The American Code of Manners: a study of the usages, laws and observances which govern intercourse in the best social circles, and of the principles which underlie them</em>. New York: W. R. Andrews, 1880.</span>\n<span class=\"footnote\">Eichler, Lillian. <em>Book of Etiquette</em>. Oyster Bay: Nelson Doubleday Inc., 1922.</span>\n<span class=\"footnote\">Johnson, Sophia Orne. <em>A Manual of Etiquette, with Hints on Politeness and Good Breeding</em>. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885.</span>\n<span class=\"footnote\">Goucher College, Special Collections and Archives. Scrapbook Collection, Mary Lee Keith. Farewell Ball Dance Card, 1922.</span>\n<span class=\"footnote\">The Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy, Special Collections and Archives. Student Life, Dance Card Collection.</span>','My Card Is Full: The Evolution of the Farewell Ball Dance Cards ','In a world of etiquette and formality, dance cards quickly became indispensable to young women in search of dancing partners. They were a manifestation of etiquette, used to keep social order and help their users follow protocol. Though dance cards are rarely used now, the study of these cards gives a lot of insight into the societies and groups that used them.\n\nLists of etiquette books remain from all different periods, instructing men and women how to act in each particular circumstance. Dancing claims a large portion of many of these books, as it was considered an elegant pastime and a way to judge one\'s character. Dancing was a sign of culture and social class, as the upper class had formal dance training while they were young.','inherit','open','open','','1326-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:58:39','2013-04-18 20:58:39','',1326,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1326-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3874,1,'2013-04-18 20:58:39','2013-04-18 20:58:39','[photospace exclude=3556]','Lehigh - Archival Materials','Click on the image above to see a slideshow of some of the archival materials used in the documentary.','inherit','open','open','','1387-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:58:39','2013-04-18 20:58:39','',1387,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1387-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3875,1,'2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','In this issue, five contributors address how hands-on work with archives has been incorporated into undergraduate education.  They each answer a series of five questions to report on what they have done, what worked or not, and what value bringing archives into the classroom, or the classroom into the archive, has.  We invite you to read through the responses by author or by question.','Undergraduates in the Archives','','inherit','open','open','','1500-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','',1500,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1500-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3876,1,'2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','<em>The Vodou Archive</em> is a collaborative partnership spearheaded by the University of Florida and Duke University that seeks to improve the understanding of a central Haitian and Haitian-American spiritual tradition by gathering the audiovisual and textual sources of Vodou communities, interpreting what we collect, expanding the holdings through a self-submission tool, and diffusing the knowledge via an open access digital library.  You can find the current prototype here &lt;<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/vodou\">http://www.dloc.com/vodou</a>&gt;,  hosted within the existing <a href=\"http://dloc.com/\">Digital Library of the Caribbean</a> (dLOC). In addition to the twenty-seven international partners working with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, collaborators from the University of Notre Dame, the University of Miami, the Schrijversvakschool, Florida International University, the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, and City Lore, among others, will contribute elements to <em>The Vodou Archive</em>. This project belongs to a tradition of scholarly work stretching back to the early twentieth century that has sought to counter reductionist and racist visions of the religion through ethnography, analysis of culture and music, and an exploration of the role of Vodou in Haiti’s founding revolution. Such work has long turned to the central texts in Haitian Vodou: its Creole-language songs.\n\nBuilding on my book, <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>,<sup><a href=\"#_ftn1\">[1]</a></sup> <em>The Vodou Archive</em> project makes these songs available in Haitian Creole and English, along with substantial interpretative annotations and essays to contextualize the collection. The edited and curated materials in <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are of major literary, historical, cultural, and religious significance. The vast Vodou corpus stands out because it preserves a wealth of African cultural, ethnological, and historical knowledge.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn2\">[2]</a></sup> The oral and textual corpora of songs are comprised of the authentic and living traditions of the Vodou religion. They are primarily sung in the context of Vodou worship in public and domestic ceremonies, and they constitute the sacred literature of the religion. Vodou songs, a constant in ceremonies, address the mythologies and characteristics of the religion: Bondye (God), the Marasa (the Divine Twins), the lwa (spirits), and the dantan (ancestors), as well as their relations with humans and nature. Vodou songs are time capsules that reveal the history and origins of the Haitian people in Africa, their journey to the Americas in the French slave trade, and their lives in the French colony. Due to their sacred nature, they arewell-preserved records of African and Haitian history and culture.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn3\">[3]</a></sup> Ceremonies and songs preserve African historical (i.e. <em>Bosou, Achade, Legba, Danbala, Simbi, Ayizan</em>), cultural (i.e. <em>lwa, ounsi, ason, oungan, manbo</em>) and geographical (i.e.<em> Rada, Savalou, Boumba</em>) terms in a creolized or blended religious and cultural system.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn4\">[4]</a></sup> Likewise, there are numerous Vodou ceremonies (rites) classified by the African <em>nanchon</em> (nations/communities) where they originate, such as Rada, Petwo, Ginen, Seneka, Ibo, Danwonmen, Nago, Kongo, Kita, etc.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn5\">[5]</a></sup>\n\nUndergraduates played, and will play, a key role in this archive.  They contributed first drafts of transcriptions and translations of Vodou songs and interviews with Vodou practitioners for the book, <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>. The undergraduate students worked on transcribing and translating interviews that I collected from Vodou priests in Haiti and they also transcribed and translated rare pre-existing published materials.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn6\">[6]</a></sup>  The students, Joanne Bartley, Vanessa Brissault, Kat Warwick, Wilmide Vernet, and Musset Apollon, were either paid hourly through grant funding or they earned credit for an independent study. We worked from manuscripts that employ a range of Haitian Creole spelling systems. The official variety, the “IPN,” named after the <em>Institut Pédagogique National</em>, was adopted for the first time in 1980. Many of our manuscripts predate 1980 and thus transcription required heavy correction and consultation with lexicographical works.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn7\">[7]</a></sup> The students had been exposed to the official variety of Haitian Creole spelling in my intermediate Haitian Creole course. After establishing the Haitian Creole source text, the students produced the first draft of the English translation. Then I corrected the Haitian Creole and English drafts in various cycles as the materials moved towards the finished products, either the book or <em>The Vodou Archive</em>.  (See Figure 1, and for the related Vodou Archive digital library, Figures 2 &amp; 3.)<span class=\"caption\" style=\"width: 166px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2358\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px; margin-right: 10px;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig1\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig1-166x250.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 1\" width=\"166\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 1: The book cover of<em> Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>.</span>\n\n<span class=\"caption left\" style=\"margin-right: 20px; width: 266px; clear: none;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig2.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-2359\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig2\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig2-333x208.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 2\" width=\"266\" height=\"166\" /></a> Figure 2: The homepage of the Vodou Archive.</span><span class=\"caption left\" style=\"margin-right: 10px; width: 266px; clear: none;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig3.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-2360\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px; clear: right;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig3\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig3-333x208.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 3\" width=\"266\" height=\"166\" /></a> Figure 3: This screen shot presents the view inside of the Vodou Archive with the filter menu for narrowing results on the left hand side of the screen.</span>\n<div class=\"footnotes\">\n<div id=\"_ftn1\" class=\"footnote\">[1] Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Joanne Bartley, <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English </em> <em>= Chante vodou an kreyòl ayisyen ak angle</em> (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).</div>\n<div id=\"_ftn2\" class=\"footnote\">[2] Max Beauvoir, <em>Le Grand Recueil Sacré ou Répertoire des Chansons du Vodou Haïtien </em>(Port-au-Prince: Edisyon Près Nasyonal d Ayiti, 2008).</div>\n<div id=\"_ftn3\" class=\"footnote\">[3] Claudine Michel, “Vodou in Haiti: Way of Life and Mode of Survival,” in <em>Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers, </em>ed. Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27–37.<em></em></div>\n<div id=\"_ftn4\" class=\"footnote\">[4] See Roger Brand, <em>Cultes vodoun et textes oraux des Wéménou du sud Bénin </em>(Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000); Brand, <em>Ethnographie et vocabulaire religieux des cultes vodoun </em>(Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000); Marc Monsia, <em>Religions indigènes et savoir endogène au Bénin </em>(Cotonou, Benin: Les Éditions du Flamboyant, 2003); Gilbert Rouget, <em>La musique et la transe </em>(Paris: Gallimard, 1991 [1980]); and Gilbert Rouget, <em>Initiatique vôdoun, images du rituel: Chants et danses initiatiques pour le culte des vôdoun au Bénin </em>(Saint-Maur, France: Éditions Sépia, 2001), v.</div>\n<div id=\"_ftn5\" class=\"footnote\">[5] Max G. Beauvoir, <em>Lapriyè Ginen </em>(Port-au-Prince: Edisyon Près Nasyonal d Ayiti. 2008), 109-110.</div>\n<div id=\"_ftn6\" class=\"footnote\">[6] Milo Marcelin, <em>Mythologie Vodou (Rite Arada)</em>,<em> </em>2 vols. (Pétionville: Éditions Canapé Vert, 1950); Laura Boulton, “Laura Boulton’s Songs” (1947), in <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English = Chante vodou an kreyòl ayisyen ak angle</em>, eds. Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Joanne Bartley (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 127-145;  J.L., “J.L. Songs,” in <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>,<em> </em>147-184; Harold Courlander, unpublished manuscript (1939–1940), University of Michigan Special Collections Library; Milo Rigaud, <em>La tradition voudoo et le voudoo haïtien: Son temple, ses mystères, sa magie </em>(Paris: Éditions Niclaus, 1953).</div>\n<div id=\"_ftn7\" class=\"footnote\">[7] Albert Valdman, Iskra Iskrova, Jacques Pierre, and Nicolas André, <em>Haitian Creole-English Bilingual Dictionary</em> (Bloomington, IN: Creole Institute, 2007); Bryant Freeman and Jowel Laguerre, <em>Haitian-English Dictionary</em>, 5th ed. (Lawrence, KS: Institute of Haitian Studies, 2004).</div>\n</div>','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 1','The Vodou Archive is a collaborative partnership spearheaded by the University of Florida and Duke University which seeks to improve the understanding of a central Haitian and Haitian-American spiritual tradition by gathering the audiovisual and textual sources of Vodou communities, interpreting what we collect, expanding the holdings through a self-submission tool, and diffusing the knowledge via an open access digital library.  ','inherit','open','open','','1504-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','',1504,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1504-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3877,1,'2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','There were many benefits to working with these undergraduates. The undergraduates chosen to work on this project were balanced bilinguals who demonstrated robust literacy in English and Haitian Creole, which I was able to assess since they had taken my intermediate Haitian Creole course. Florida has a large Haitian-American population that is second only to New York. In my position at the University of Florida, I instruct a significant number of Haitians and Haitian-Americans who have an advanced command of spoken and written Haitian Creole. Due to this strength, it is only natural to cultivate and tap into these talents for the benefit of their professional development and for the momentum of this project. As Haitian Creole is the third most spoken language in Florida after English and Spanish, developing advanced literacy in the language benefits employment prospects and it empowers individuals to seek out unique knowledge that exists only in Haitian Creole. Bilingual and biliterate candidates for employment in Florida’s healthcare industry, tourism industry, government, the law enforcement and judiciary system, transportation, and a host of other industries stand out next to their monolingual peers. Mastery of literacy in two languages is beneficial because knowledge can be acquired and shared via different mediums; individuals with these skills can facilitate communication, accuracy, and productivity.\n\nComplex and large projects like <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em>—projects that overlap with specialized aspects of culture and language—are best done, I think, in collaboration with others. Since many of the texts are at first obscure, it is helpful to have several individuals bring unique knowledge and skills to the task of translation and interpretation. Each undergraduate editorial assistant has a unique mastery of Haitian Creole and English. Since material is parsed and analyzed by various editorial assistants, over time the collaboration allows for the emergence of an accurate collective transcription and translation. Given their fluency in Haitian Creole and English, the undergraduates provided outstanding transcriptions and translations of Vodou songs and interviews with Vodou practitioners that I could edit and improve upon for the book or <em>The Vodou Archive</em>.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 2','There were many benefits working with these undergraduates. The undergraduates selected to work for this project were balanced bilinguals who demonstrated robust literacy in English and Haitian Creole, which I was able to assess since they had taken my intermediate Haitian Creole course. ','inherit','open','open','','1507-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','',1507,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1507-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3878,1,'2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','The positive responses I received from publishers reinforced my sense that this project would be viable. In addition to this standard measure of academic success, the project itself was very successful as an intellectual and practical collaboration. The undergraduate collaborators worked vigorously and productively, helping to quickly advance the project. Vodou religion itself is a communal phenomenon. Likewise, I want the book and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> to express the unity of our collaboration as a means of ensuring accuracy through multiple voices and perspectives. Plus, as someone who was not raised within Vodou religion, I sensed that my scholarship on Haitian religion and its primary language, Haitian Creole, would benefit from extensive refereeing from a wide variety of informants: from <em>oungan </em>(priests), <em>manbo </em>(priestesses), <em>bòkò </em>(diviners), <em>ounsi</em> (initiates), scholars of all stripes, students in my classes, and the students directly involved in the project. As sharp intellectuals in their own right, these students participated in a triangular working methodology (my students, Vodou practitioners, and me) that helped ensure quality. They lent their talents to correcting, fashioning, and polishing the final product. The book and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the direct result of sharing texts and ideas through cooperative study, writing, and editing. As several students have native command of Haitian Creole, they were able to bring their deep knowledge and instincts of the language to the tasks I assigned them. Overall, it is the friendship and collegiality of working with people from all walks of life, and the experience of discovery, that has made, and continues to make, this project a great success for me. Writing and editing for academics is often a solitary activity. Working with undergraduate research assistants transformed the experience into a textual conversation about the nature and design of Vodou religion.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 3','The positive responses I received from publishers reinforced my sense that this project would be viable.  In addition to this standard measure of academic success, the project itself was very successful as an intellectual and practical collaboration. The undergraduate collaborators worked vigorously and productively, helping to quickly advance the project. Vodou religion itself is a communal phenomenon. ','inherit','open','open','','1510-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','',1510,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1510-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3879,1,'2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','The major challenges in writing and editing <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the profusion of variant spelling systems found in Haitian Creole until 1980. Most Haitian-Americans I work with at the University of Florida have limited exposure to written Haitian Creole prior to enrolling in my courses. After a year of intermediate Haitian Creole, it is still typical to misspell certain words. Given that the source texts they work from routinely employ spelling conventions that are no longer current, it is also common for undergraduate research assistants to reproduce the outdated spelling, especially in the cases of words that refer to concepts that are unfamiliar to them. The source text in (a) below, taken from scholar Milo Marcelin (1950), illustrates the base from which transcription (b) and translation (c) were produced:\n\n(a)\n<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/figure_a.png\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3242\" title=\"figure_a\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/figure_a.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"252\" height=\"70\" /></a>\n<table width=\"70%\" border=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"3\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td>(b)</td>\n<td>(c)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Danbala Wèdo se koulèv dlo!</td>\n<td>Danbala Wèdo is the water snake!</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Chèche Danbala, ki bò w a wè li?</td>\n<td>Look for Danbala, where will you see him?</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Papa Danbala se koulèv dlo,</td>\n<td>Papa Danbala is the water snake,</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td>li plonje anba dlo!</td>\n<td>he dives under water!</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n\nIn texts like this one, it is common for research assistants to import uncorrected words like <em>Oueddo</em>, or to accidently retain the “c” or the unpronounced “e” in <em>coulève </em>instead of writing the official <em>koulèv</em>. This impacted my work, as it required me to extensively edit the students’ work and send it back for review and correction; while it was labor intensive, the feedback provided the students with the opportunity to master the transcription of Haitian Creole and the translation into English. Students will learn from their mistakes if they can see what they are and have the chance to correct them. It is also common for students to import erroneous grammatical analyses by writing “<em>wa</em>” following <em>oua</em> (in line two), a minor confusion in which separate words are conflated. The correct representation of <em>oua </em>is “<em>w a</em>” (“you will” or “will you,” when used interrogatively as in the above). As senior editor, I had the challenge of constantly encountering examples of outdated spellings that research assistants had unwittingly imported into their transcription.\n\nThe quality of the undergraduates’ work varied widely. The nuances of the mythology, the “cryptic tricksterism” of Vodou semantics, and the rich—and obscure—idioms, expressions, and conceptualizations of the Haitian Creole language meant that all the texts required years of refinement through the editorial process, which is based upon countless critical re-readings from various points of view.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn4\">[8]</a></sup> Thus, working with undergraduates is rewarding but requires mentoring and patience due to their limited experience.\n<div class=\"footnotes\">\n<div id=\"_ftn8\" class=\"footnote\">[8] Karen McCarthy Brown, “Plenty Confidence in Myself: The Initiation of a White Woman Scholar into Haitian Vodou,” <em>Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion</em> 3, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 67–76, 74.</div>\n</div>','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 4','The major challenges in writing and editing <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the profusion of variant spelling systems found in Haitian Creole until 1980. Most Haitian-Americans I work with at the University of Florida have limited exposure to written Haitian Creole prior to enrolling in my courses.','inherit','open','open','','1513-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','',1513,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1513-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3880,1,'2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','<em>The Vodou Archive</em> is being unveiled currently (spring of 2012) in my course “Introduction to Haitian Vodou.” On a weekly basis, different parts of the archive will be highlighted and students will be expected to visit the digital library to read or view the assigned materials. In order to stress the importance of <em>The Vodou Archive</em> as a digital library, I will also require that students write essays about some of its components. As Florida has numerous active Vodou communities, students will be encouraged to produce materials for the archive, such as photographs or recordings from Vodou ceremonies and rituals.\n\nThe work undertaken in collaboration with undergraduates to produce <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> has been integrated into the curriculum in numerous ways. For example, students are assigned reading materials that spring from the collaboration. Based on the topics selected for essays, students are encouraged to read or examine parts of <em>The Vodou Archive.</em> For example, students who want to write about how Catholic chromolithographs camouflage Vodou <em>lwa</em> (spirits) are encouraged to visit the selection in <em>The Vodou Archive</em> (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/AA00008694/allvolumes2\" target=\"_blank\">click here</a>); other students might need photographic data about Vodou (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/AA00005507/00001/thumbs\" target=\"_blank\">click here</a>); other students may need to consult important but hard-to-find works such as Arthur Holly’s (1928) <em>Dra-po</em> (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/UF00076958\" target=\"_blank\">click here</a>); finally, some students will want to listen to rare recordings made by Maya Deren held exclusively by <em>The Vodou Archive</em> (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/UF00082017\" target=\"_blank\">click here</a>). <em>The Vodou Archive</em> is rich and diverse assemblage of documents; while not all of it can be directly included in the curriculum for all students, individual students are encouraged to branch into the parts of the archive that are relevant to their own work.\n\nAnother way that I will increase student contributions to <em>The Vodou Archive</em> will be through the creation of <em>The Vodou Journal</em>, a planned dimension of the digital archive: ten of the students’ best essays will be submitted to <em>The Vodou Journal</em> for peer review and possible publication. I hope that this unique opportunity for undergraduates to make a significant contribution to the scholarship on Vodou will also stimulate greater attention to writing and introduce undergraduates to the process of scholarly publishing in general.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 5','<em>The Vodou Archive</em> is being unveiled currently (spring of 2012) in my course “Introduction to Haitian Vodou.” On a weekly basis, different parts of the archive will be highlighted and students will be expected to visit the digital library to read or view the assigned materials.  In order to stress the importance of <em>The Vodou Archive</em> as a digital library, I will also require that students write essays about some of its components.','inherit','open','open','','1516-revision-2','','','2013-04-18 20:35:22','2013-04-18 20:35:22','',1516,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1516-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3881,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','A few years ago, I was an undergraduate in the archive. In a class called “Dead Media Research Studio” at New York University (NYU), Professor Ben Kafka introduced me to the great quip about the chiasmic imperative of good research: to “make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” With this echoing in my ears, I found myself in the entrails of Bobst Library interviewing two preservation specialists about a small but intriguing collection of wire recordings. The recordings, I found out, were of rather unknown origins in the early 1950s and contained some controversial tirades against President Truman. Though certainly not an exhaustive archive, the recordings provided me with my first meaningful interaction with historical primary sources. And it was a rather lonely endeavor; the hallways leading to troves of under-researched sources were woefully empty compared to the bustling study lounges located just a few floors above.\n\nMy research on wire recordings ended up as part of a dossier (similar to the format and scope of a Wikipedia entry) I wrote with two classmates for the Dead Media Archive. Professors Ben Kafka and Alex Galloway had rescued this archive from its own ironic demise as an e-mail list created by Bruce Sterling to catalog and describe obsolete technologies. The new Dead Media Archive, technically a wiki platform for simultaneous publishing and editing, became the centerpiece for two classes in the Department of Media, Culture, &amp; Communication (one undergraduate and one graduate). The semester in which I took the class, there were barely ten students enrolled. It puzzled me a bit, since Professor Kafka announced on the first day what every undergraduate seems to dream of hearing: there would be no exams, no papers, and very little reading. Instead, we were to be immersed in the city’s archives for a semester. Each student ended up producing three dossiers for the archive. In addition to one on wire recording, I also wrote an entry on spirit photography, a popular turn-of-the-century practice of “capturing” ghosts on film, which was accompanied by the rise of Spiritualism. A sizeable portion of my hard drive is still taken up by copies of the microform proceedings of the 1869 trial against William Mumler, a New York City spirit photographer accused of fraud (see Figure 1). My final dossier presented a more argumentative take on the “death” of media by cataloging marginalia, the scribbles in a text’s margins, as obsolete relics of a technological paradigm.<span class=\"caption right\" style=\"width: 200px; padding-left: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig1.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2331 alignright\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"gotkin_fig1\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig1-193x250.png\" alt=\"Figure 1\" width=\"193\" height=\"250\" /></a>Figure 1: Microform copy of the proceedings of a 1869 court case against spirit photographer William Mumler.</span>\n\nBefore arriving at NYU, I would have scoffed at the idea of studying media history. There was much sighing on my first day in the required “History of Communication” course; I imagined, like many fellow undergraduates, that a degree in media studies would help me land a job in New York’s radio, television, or film industries. History, for us, was a roadblock in the path to careers less concerned with the past than with the frenetic present. The thrill of finding primary sources changed my mind. In the archive, I realized the opportunity to conduct original research. The excitement of archival work is shared by undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike; it is the thrill of finding something that has not been thought about enough, and then working hard enough to make it both familiar and strange.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 1','','inherit','open','open','','1528-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1528,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1528-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3882,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','My experience in the archive directly contributed to my interest in graduate school, which is perhaps unsurprising when you think about the demands of archival work. The move from undergraduate to graduate study shares the guiding principles of archival work. You must first learn what others have said, before delving into the topics that demand further examination. Archival research, in this sense, is the never-ending game of hide-and-seek with that perfect research subject we yen for in each new project, class, and semester.\n\nAside from its importance in training future scholars, archival work is significant even for students who have less professional allegiance to the academy. Original research is a principle worth incorporating in undergraduate course design, as it signifies the marketable job-placement skills that supposedly evidence proper university training. In the 1997 <em>Harper’s Magazine</em> essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education,” Mark Edmundson suggests undergraduate study has become “lite entertainment for bored college students.” He writes, “University culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images.”<sup><a href=\"#_ftn1\">[1]</a></sup> Edmundson goes on to argue that the transactional nature of undergraduate study creates an imbalance between what professors put into a syllabus and what students get out of it. But if we think about archival research as a process of skill development, it just may serve as a corrective to the literal and figurative banking of education.\n\nArchival work is often thought to be methodologically opposed to new media research techniques; thus, the theory goes, undergraduates, as “digital natives,” must learn and maintain a skill set in the archive apart from their new media literacy. How, for example, should undergraduates be expected to navigate the thick mess of a paper archive when Facebook and Twitter are their daily information grounds, where information streams are updated automatically and search boxes are never further than the top of the page? If the job market is increasingly concerned with social media, why should students spend time poring over “dead” technologies? Contrary to the notion that the archive and new media are irreconcilable, we might instead think of them as complementary educational forces. It is no coincidence, for example, that undergraduates in the archive are more likely to be keen and discerning arbiters of information.\n<div class=\"footnotes\">\n<div id=\"_ftn1\" class=\"footnote\">[1] Mark Edmundson, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” <em>Harper’s Magazine</em>, September 1997, 40.</div>\n<div></div>\n</div>','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 2','My experience in the archive directly contributed to my interest in graduate school, which is perhaps unsurprising when you think about the demands of archival work. The move from undergraduate to graduate study shares the guiding principles of archival work. ','inherit','open','open','','1527-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1527,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1527-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3883,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','In one of my undergraduate courses a professor handed out a checklist for good archival research. The last item on the list was simply, “Get lucky.” My most meaningful archival work has indeed come out of the pleasures of spelunking in archives, hoping to come upon a hidden gem. In my junior year of college I studied abroad in Paris, where I took a class on global media structures. As many graduate-level courses require, the final paper was an individual research project rather than a paper based on class readings and discussions. I knew that my home department in New York offered a course called “Hacker Culture &amp; Politics,” which I ended up taking as soon as I returned. In anticipation of that course, I contacted the professor, Biella Coleman, to ask if she had any contacts in Paris who were working on hacking. After a series of e-mail introductions through friends of friends, I got in touch with the head of a hacker space just outside of Paris.\n<span class=\"caption right\" style=\"width: 200px; margin-left: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig2.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2332\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"gotkin_fig2\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig2-199x250.png\" alt=\"Figure 2\" width=\"199\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 2: Example of a typical French hacker e-zine c. 1994</span>\n\nAlthough I originally intended to study a contemporary aspect of hacking, I ended up with a historical project. After talking with a few French hackers on Internet Relay Chat, it became clear that the early French hacker scene was highly ritualized around electronic magazines, or e-zines. Ultimately, I wrote the paper based on research from about seventy different e-zines sent over digital bulletin board systems and the nascent Internet (see Figure 2). Getting access to the e-zines was not easy, and in the end, I amassed my own archive. Mine was not the image of the archive-as-dungeon, but instead the archive-as-disk-space. Perhaps as difficult to catalog and maintain as any rare book collection (if not more so), the e-zines I collected were infinitely reproducible and accessible from anywhere, even after I left France.\n\nArchival practices change when the historical subject is itself born digital. The challenge of marshaling evidence around a research question is no less important, but the dematerialized archive demands new techniques of investigation. What happens, for example, when we can do archival research from a coffee shop? The absence of the physical walls in a traditional archive might become a new figurative challenge. What is archival work if the archivist is not literally surrounded by material? These are the questions that productively vex my research. Creating the digital archive has been my greatest success because it provided me with a set of substantive and methodological questions that continue to complicate and broaden my research years later.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 3','In one of my undergraduate courses a professor handed out a checklist for good archival research. The last item on the list was simply, “Get lucky.” My most meaningful archival work has indeed come out of the pleasures of spelunking in archives, hoping to come upon a hidden gem. In my junior year of college I studied abroad in Paris, where I took a class on global media structures.','inherit','open','open','','1530-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1530,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1530-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3884,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','Doing undergraduate archival work can be like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. In most classes, the readings and discussions act as essential compasses in guiding the student through the semester. In the archive, most, if not all, bets are off; rarely are there already made tutorials on organizing and making sense of the productive entropy that often marks an archive. How are we to situate a newly discovered text if we have not even finished our undergraduate prerequisite courses?\n\nFor me, the most challenging moments in the archive were the earliest, both because I was adjusting to the demands of archival methods and because I had only a small number of anchoring texts echoing in my head to help me make sense of anything I found. In fact, I probably missed a number of promising leads in the archive because I did not know to look for them.\n\nA good friend and I won a small grant at NYU for a research project about marginalia. We were to trace the marginalia of a particular ancient religious text, the <em>Hermes Trismegistus</em>. While I was scouring libraries in Paris for the history of the text’s early translation, my partner was in New York looking for evidence of contemporary readers’ marks on the book. My job was to plot the ancient scribbles, which seemed easy enough before I actually entered the stacks (see Figure 3). I was looking for the text itself while piecing together others’ accounts of the its migrations. <span class=\"caption right\" style=\"width: 200px; padding-left: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig3.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2333 \" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"gotkin_fig3\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig3-190x250.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 3\" width=\"190\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 3: Depiction of the god Hermes Trismegistus (courtesy of Roanoke College)</span>\n\nAs it turns out, the <em>Hermes Trismegistus</em> is an enduringly baffling historical object and its ancestry is riddled with gaps. A more experienced researcher would know how to explain this fitful history and perhaps use the inconsistencies and question marks as launching pads for substantive contributions. But since it was my first time in the archive for a sustained and labor-intensive project, they instead weighed on me like chains. Not only did I have trouble tracing the marginalia themselves, I had trouble explaining how I was having trouble.\n\nI realize now that this situation is not so much overcome with academic training as it is more efficiently handled with it. That moment of chaos and crisis is in fact a prerequisite to clear thinking, in my experience. As an undergraduate I was overwhelmed by the disorder of the archival process; but then again, these troubles might have been the best training.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 4','Doing undergraduate archival work can be like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. In most classes, the readings and discussions act as essential compasses in guiding the student through the semester. In the archive, most, if not all, bets are off; rarely are there already made tutorials on organizing and making sense of the productive entropy that often marks an archive.','inherit','open','open','','1533-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1533,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1533-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3885,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','As an undergraduate I felt like the archive primed me to search for pristine differences between the past and present. It was as if the past was a foreign country I was visiting while in the archive and that I had to translate into a more modern language. Yet the evidence I worked with was rarely so easily explained on the page. Similarities across time were often differences in addition, illustrating the messiness of historiography. There was also the logistical challenge of gauging the depth of a semester-long archival project. I had the classic Goldilocks problem of finding a research question that was neither too big nor too small.\n\nThe added obstacle is that undergraduates rarely devote their time to academics as faithfully as graduate students and faculty do. As an undergraduate I was juggling internships, part-time jobs, and community service with my class work. Before I started my undergraduate archival work, I usually resolved the logistical tangles by relegating reading and writing to the wee morning hours. When I needed to start visiting collections around New York City, this was not so easy. I started setting aside time to commute uptown to the New York Public Library, for example, while giving myself enough time to grab lunch and get back downtown for class.\n\nThe challenge was manageable on a practical level, but also on a conceptual one. Undergraduates—and I include myself when I was one—tend to think that setting aside business hours for internships will help develop the practical skills necessary for landing the perfect job after graduation. And there is no denying that internships can be useful in teaching the rigors of the workplace. But when we design courses for undergraduates, requiring them to spend time actively engaged in searching and <em>re</em>-searching, the pace and tenor of undergraduate study changes. For me, substituting work done alone, late at night in my apartment, for the work of talking with librarians, archivists, and other experts was a far more meaningful undergraduate experience, and something that was actually easily marketable for a job interview.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 5','As an undergraduate I felt like the archive primed me to search for pristine differences between the past and present. It was as if the past was a foreign country I was visiting while in the archive and that I had to translate into a more modern language. Yet the evidence I worked with was rarely so easily explained on the page.','inherit','open','open','','1536-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1536,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1536-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3886,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','I am the director of the Undergraduate Program at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a program I created five years ago. It consists of two semester-long seminars in which students from universities in the D.C. area come to the Library to study book history and early modern culture. The goal of the seminars is for students to expand their knowledge of the period and their research skills by working directly with rare materials in the context of book history. The course is divided into three thematic concerns: books as physical objects (descriptive bibliography), the relationship between books and cultural forces (print culture), and books as vehicles for text (editorial theory and practice). By moving from how books are made to the economics of authorship and readers’ uses of books to how their manifestation in print affects books’ meanings, the course models different approaches to studying the histories of books and strives to explore how each approach is related to others. The class as a whole reads secondary sources (Darnton, McKenzie, McLeod, Sherman, Lesser), and class discussions make frequent use of rare materials brought into the classroom.  (The current syllabus for the course can be found <a title=\"Book and Early Modern Culture Syllabus\" href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/FolgerBooks\">here</a>.) When we discuss how books are printed, for instance, I will bring books into class that illustrate moments where the printing went askew—a misfoliated book, perhaps—in order to learn what the evidence of these mistakes can teach us about the process of making a book. Or we will devote a session to looking at bibles from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in order to see how their physical appearance changes, to explore how physical characteristics suggest different ways to read and use the bibles, and to examine what they might reveal about cultural and religious battles.\n\nWhile the class works together on these discussions, each student is studying one book that they have chosen to focus on. With their own book, they research its makers (authors, translators, and compilers as well as printers, publishers, and booksellers), its intended audience, and its later users and collectors. At the end of the semester, each student produces a biography of their book using their primary research and the book’s physical characteristics to tell its life story, from its inception to its afterlife as both text and object.\n\nIn both of these ways, working with rare materials is integral to the course and to the students’ learning experiences. Students in the class are Readers at the Library on the same terms that any other scholar given a Reader’s Card is: they can use any of the modern and rare materials in our collections that are not normally restricted. They come to the Library weekly for the seminar and return to the Library regularly to conduct their research for the class. Their Reader’s Cards are good for twelve months, so students can return to the Library after the seminar is done to carry on their own research. In other words, through the Undergraduate Seminar, students learn not only to use rare materials in their studies, but to be citizens of rare materials libraries.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 1','','inherit','open','open','','1541-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1541,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1541-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3887,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','I think the biggest benefit of bringing students into special collections through this course is that students own the process of discovery. In many undergraduate humanities courses, students learn about a subject through reading about it and, sometimes, conducting research on a topic of their choosing. But their research is rarely significant in terms of discovering new knowledge or generating a new perspective on something. Anyone who has taught a Shakespeare course can attest to the fact that even the best student papers do not often contribute something new to the field of Shakespeare studies; they might be interesting, and insightful, and they might be genuinely exciting to the student, but they are not new. But when students work with primary materials in special collections, they can be working with something that no one else has considered before. Sure, many people have written about More’s <em>Utopia</em>, but no one else may have produced a history of the particular copy of the third English edition of his book, which can now be found at the Folger with the call number STC 18096 Copy 1. More importantly, I have not done that either. In creating the biographies of their books, students are on their own, doing utterly original research. I can provide guidance, and so can generations of scholars before them, but students will not have that sinking feeling of realizing that somebody else has already written what they want to say, and has written it better.\n\nThat ownership of their research shifts how students see themselves as scholars. They are each experts on their own book, and everyone teaches everyone else when it comes to sharing insights into the nature of the book trade, the shape of authorship, or the variety of book use. Students produce long research papers on their final biographies, having revised earlier drafts, rethought their assumptions, and spent countless hours in the Library and at home working through their books’ stories. There is a consistent level of engagement with the material that I have not seen in other advanced-level seminars I have taught. Their papers routinely go above and beyond the expectations I have set for the projects; I have learned to suggest word limits as minimum expectations, not maximum cut-offs, since when I ask for a 3000-word paper, there are always students who have produced such rich research that they need 5000 words to do it justice.\n\nI suppose some might question the scholarly benefit of pouring all that energy into one copy of one edition of one book. But by limiting their attention to one copy, students have the room to fully explore the range of connections and complications for that book, and with that knowledge, students are able to extrapolate to the production of other books and to the ways in which knowledge passes from one generation to the next. The history of who read and collected the 1597 English <em>Utopia</em> over the centuries sheds light on our reading and use of the text today. More importantly, the skills students learn exploring one book can be used to explore any book, even a book made after the hand-press period. And because students are genuinely excited by the sense of discovery, they absorb and retain those ideas, bringing them to their other courses and to their lives following graduation. Being able to discover and to be real scholars as undergraduates opens up doors to them long after our class is done.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 2','','inherit','open','open','','1544-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1544,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1544-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3888,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','Oh my, this is a hard one to answer. Without intending to sound unbearably sappy, there are nearly too many moments of success for me to count! My favorite moments are those that come outside the seminar: when a student makes a connection between what we have been discussing and what another class of hers is doing; when a professor tells me that a former student has been teaching them all to pay attention to the textual history of a poem they are reading; or when a former student sends me an e-mail to point out a newspaper article about books he found interesting. All those moments mean that the lessons they have learned in our seminar are living on for them in other contexts.\n\nOther favorite moments have been when students have found something out about a book that is news to the Library’s catalogers. Given how tremendous the Folger catalogers are, that is hard to do! But, for instance, one student was working on <em>The essayes of a prentise</em>, a book that had been written by King James in 1594, when he was James VI of Scotland and not yet James I of England. The student’s interpretation of the book was that it was deeply embedded in James’s perspective as a Scottish monarch and aspirant to the English throne, especially since the book was bound as a presentation copy for Lord Burghley. But the catalog record for the book, following standard name authority rules, listed the author as James I. Given the student’s research, however, the book’s record now includes a note clarifying the nature of James’s title when it was written. (You can see a blog post I wrote about the book and this issue <a href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/2009/09/essayes-of-a-prentise/\">here</a>; you can find the catalog record for it <a href=\"http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=163210\">here</a>.)\n\nAnother student was working on James Smith’s <em>The generall historie of Virginia</em> (1624) and was struck by its odd binding, in which one armorial device was stamped on top of another. The Folger’s catalog identified one of them as James I’s, but it took some joint sleuthing for her and I to work out that the stamp on top of James’s was that of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. As far as I can work out, no one else had noticed that, not the previous owners, the booksellers, or the Library’s catalogers. (That record still does not include the additional information about the binding because I have not yet brought it to their attention. But you can read about the book and see some pictures of the binding <a href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/2011/04/an-armorial-binding-mystery/\">here</a>; the catalog record is <a href=\"http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=164134\">here</a>.)','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 3','','inherit','open','open','','1547-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1547,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1547-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3889,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','The first set of challenges is logistical. Bringing students into the Library changed some of the Library’s usual operating procedures and has made me adjust some of my own habits of teaching. The Undergraduate Program was the first time the Library allowed undergraduates into the Library to conduct research in any sort of ongoing basis. (There is an established fellowship for Amherst students that brings two or three students down to do research at the Library for a couple of weeks each year, but the intense use of rare materials and the duration of the fellowship are significantly different from the structure of the Undergraduate Seminars.) Even though the Library was supportive of my program and eager to help adjust policy, understandably there was some concern about how needy the students would be: Would they require a lot of supervision? Would they be asking for a lot of assistance? Would they be disruptive to the other readers? (The answer to all of these is no. In part because of the intensive training they receive in the classroom about how to handle books and how to find the resources they need, the students are in many ways better prepared to work in the Reading Rooms than many others!) There were also procedural questions that needed to be resolved. Before my program, rare materials were not routinely brought into the Library’s classrooms and were never handled by non-staff members in classrooms. Putting together a new policy on classroom use (how many items, how they could and could not be handled, the number of staff members necessary to supervise, etc.) was vital. And it was not difficult, thanks to the supportive curatorial staff. I did have to adjust my own teaching style. My preference is to decide what I am going to do in any given class as I go along. I might decide to try a particular approach the day before class, if my sense of how the class is proceeding suggests it. But I cannot decide at the last minute to bring a set of rare books into the seminar room because curators need to vet the rare materials in advance. That is not a big obstacle, but it has required me to adjust.\n\nA bigger challenge has been getting used to not having all the answers. My students come from a wide range of majors: English and history, to be sure, but I have also taught majors in French, theology, art history, music, drama, medieval studies, physics, and economics. And because I let them choose any work that was printed before 1700 for their research project, students often choose works that I have never heard of. What this means is that I need to learn along with them. A student working on <em>Utopia</em> is fairly easy; a student working on a Czech herbal (a book describing plants and their medicinal properties) is a lot harder to guide. But this is also a challenge that is fun and beneficial: if I knew everything, I’d be bored and my students wouldn’t have room for discovery.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 4','','inherit','open','open','','1550-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1550,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1550-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3890,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','I have only recently begun experimenting with using archival materials in the classroom, so I am still learning how to achieve the best results. Initially, I began by limiting student involvement to two or three weeks of the semester. I found that, practically, the students did much better when they worked in groups, in part because of the potential for some students to be more engaged than others, and in part because the students enjoyed being part of a team. Penn, of course, is home to the Wharton School of Business, and I often have a few Wharton students in class. These students helpfully pointed out that many Wharton classes assign students to a team in order to better prepare them for the private sector. This also allows the students to divide up the work according to each individual’s skill set. I have found the team-oriented approach—with all of the teams working together as one larger group devoted to producing a quality product for Native American clients—to work very well in the highly professionalized culture of Penn. However, this culture is double edged, for it also makes it difficult to attract pre-professional students to courses on Native American studies, which is not a program or a department at Penn.\n\nAs I became more comfortable and was able to prepare more quickly for the semester, I found that I could make more materials available to the students. I try to balance the students’ exposure to the originals by providing them with digital surrogates and by visiting the Penn Museum and the APS. This can be challenging because the APS is not set up for student visits; it is only because of my position as Director of Native American projects that I am able to arrange for a classroom to view original documents. The Penn Museum, on the other hand, actively encourages professors to bring their classes and provides access to the storage facilities. This planning paid off when, to my surprise, the students asked to have more time to work on their projects. Last semester, one student suggested that the entire semester should be devoted to creating the exhibits for the class project. When we talked about this together, the students expressed that they felt their work with archival materials would be more meaningful if they learned more about their historical and cultural background. The best students had done this research on their own, but I realized that the early part of the course could be structured to teach the students a great deal more about the cultural context of the archival materials, which would result in them understanding the materials better and doing a better job designing the exhibits. So this spring I am devoting an entire semester of a graduate seminar to researching archival materials and creating a digital exhibit based on student research. The APS recently acquired more than 500 hours of audio recordings related to Ojibwe culture in northern Canada (the acquisition was an outcome of the Pimachiowin Aki collaboration). The first five weeks of the class will be devoted to teaching the students the religious background necessary to understand the Ojibwe ceremonies being discussed; the ethics of working with religious materials in terms of what can or cannot be placed on the web; and basic archival skills so that the students can create a database and tags to make this new material more accessible to scholars and the Ojibwe communities where the material originated. All of the students’ work will be donated to those communities and the database will be housed at the APS.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 5','I have only recently begun experimenting with using archival materials in the classroom, so I am still learning how to achieve the best results. Initially, I began by limiting student involvement to two or three weeks of the semester. I found that, practically, the students did much better when they worked in groups, in part because of the potential for some students to be more engaged than others, and in part because the students enjoyed being part of a team.','inherit','open','open','','1589-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1589,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1589-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(3891,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','The biggest challenge by far is the preliminary work, which must be completed before the semester begins. In order to work with either the APS or Penn Museum collections, a good deal of paperwork must be filled out to secure permission from the curatorial staff. Because this material is rarely used by students who are designing digital exhibits for the web, often we must create new forms and convince very cautious curators who want to be sure that the tribe’s involvement will be properly documented—itself a very time-consuming endeavor. I find that it is also essential to communicate openly and honestly with institutional administrators at every level to help them understand that such projects are mutually beneficial to the archive, the students, and the indigenous communities. The next challenge is to locate enough relevant material to keep the students occupied for a month, or even an entire semester. One must also be aware that a good deal of time and expertise are required after the semester is over to ensure that the resulting exhibit is of a high enough quality to be valuable to the Native American communities and the general public. The current Andrew W. Mellon grant that I direct for the APS includes a Native American Fellows program that brings distinguished members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians and the Ojibwe Nation to Philadelphia. Ideally, this provides the students a unique opportunity to meet the indigenous wisdom keepers who are responsible for returning the digital surrogates to their community. This is a wonderful experience for the students, but requires great care to make sure that the Native people feel comfortable talking to students who have no real sense of the diplomacy and respect for indigenous protocols involved in this kind of work.\n\nPedagogically, it takes at least a month to provide the students with enough historical, anthropological, religious, and cultural background so that they can identify important primary materials. Because some of the material is considered sacred, students must learn protocols for dealing with culturally sensitive objects. This is made even more difficult because the Society of American Archivists has not yet issued protocols concerning Native American cultural sensitivities. The current APS Mellon grant will digitize 3000 hours of audio recordings related to Native American cultures. The grant has also allowed us to create a Native American advisory board to establish protocols for protecting culturally sensitive archival materials. Currently, I have two independent-study students working on documenting and implementing protocols for cultural sensitivity at the APS. This cutting-edge work is another important means of involving the most advanced students in ongoing research projects with archival materials.\n\nIt can be difficult, however, to teach the students to be respectful of how Native people see their own culture. The idea, for example, that museum artifacts are considered animate objects—or living beings—is sometimes beyond the intellectual reach of some students. The success of the projects, therefore, often depends on the students’ respect for and understanding of the culture. The students’ performance can be very uneven, with some going on to win grants to pursue further work in the area and others sitting quietly in the corner.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 4','The biggest challenge by far is the preliminary work, which must be completed before the semester begins. In order to work with either the APS or Penn Museum collections, a good deal of paperwork must be filled out to secure permission from the curatorial staff. ','inherit','open','open','','1586-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 20:38:36','2013-04-18 20:38:36','',1586,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1586-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(3892,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:51','2013-04-18 20:38:51','There have been many exciting outcomes from the students’ interactions with archival materials. In the spring of 2010, the class project was to design a digital exhibit that would bring together Penn anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell’s Ojibwe photographs from the American Philosophical Society and Ojibwe artifacts from the Penn Museum, all of which were collected in the 1930s. (See Figure 1.)<span id=\"attachment_2610\" class=\"alignright wp-caption\" style=\"width: 335px;\"><a title=\"Bandolier Bag\" href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/powell_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2625\" title=\"Ojibwe Bandolier Bag\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/powell_1-333x147.jpg\" alt=\"\'Ojibwe Bandolier Bag,\' Penn Museum, photograph by David McDonald, DMcD Productions.\" width=\"333\" height=\"147\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 1</em>: \"Ojibwe Bandolier Bag,\" Penn Museum, photograph by David McDonald, DMcD Productions.</span></span> Not long before the semester started, I had been contacted by Gord Jones, the project manager of Pimachiowin Aki Corporation, who is working on submitting a UNESCO World Heritage Site grant application to preserve 40,000 square kilometers of boreal forest and the cultural landscape of five Ojibwe First Nations. One challenge of the grant is to define a “cultural landscape.” A number of scholars associated with the Pimachiowin Aki project had come to the APS and digitized material from the Hallowell collection. Hallowell had worked in Ojibwe First Nation communities in northern Manitoba and Ontario for ten years, so there was a large amount of material related to this very small, remote place. The students photographed and documented the objects from the Hallowell collection at the Penn Museum and presented them to Ojibwe representatives of the Pimachiowin Aki project at a conference held at the APS shortly after the semester ended. The students’ material is now part of a historic project, the first UNESCO World Heritage Site application ever submitted by the Canadian government on behalf of First Nations.\n\nLast semester my students worked in groups to curate an exhibit entitled <em>Cherokee Stickball</em>, based on the research of Frank Speck, a highly distinguished anthropologist. Speck taught at Penn for half a century, collecting more than forty stickball sticks for the Penn Museum and depositing photographs of Cherokee stickball games at the APS. (See Figure 2.) <span id=\"attachment_2609\" class=\"alignright wp-caption\" style=\"width: 300px;\"><a href=\"http://www.archivejournal.net/issue/2/three-sixty/undergraduates-in-the-archives-powell-3/attachment/powell_2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-2609\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-2609\" title=\"Powell 2, Cherokee Stickball\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/powell_2.jpg\" alt=\"Cherokee Stickball, American Philosophical Society, Frank Speck collection.\" width=\"300\" height=\"345\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 2.</em> Cherokee Stickball, American Philosophical Society, Frank Speck collection.</span></span> In the 1930s, Speck worked with a Cherokee Medicine Man named Will West Long, who provided Speck with a rich ethnographic description of the spiritual dimensions of the game. Will West’s grand nephew, T.J. Holland, came to the APS conference in the spring of 2010, and I had the opportunity to interview him along with another very knowledgeable elder, Tom Belt. The students created Quick Time videos that combined Speck’s photographs taken in the 1930s with the contemporary oral histories. They also photographed all of the sticks in the Penn Museum’s collection and created a database of descriptive materials. One of the students won a Mellon grant through Penn to take the digital materials to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee in North Carolina. Today, Cherokee craftsman are recreating the older sticks based on the students’ photographs, and the videos will be used in a museum exhibit that will be displayed at the tribally owned Junaluska Museum, located in Robbinsville, North Carolina.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 3','There have been many exciting outcomes from the students’ interactions with archival materials. In the spring of 2010, the class project was to design a digital exhibit that would bring together Penn anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell’s Ojibwe photographs from the American Philosophical Society and Ojibwe artifacts from the Penn Museum.','inherit','open','open','','1583-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 20:38:51','2013-04-18 20:38:51','',1583,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1583-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(3893,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:54','2013-04-18 20:38:54','The most obvious benefit to Penn students is the opportunity to work on a project designed to be used by Native American community members and to hear the voices of elders. Penn, unfortunately, has no Native American faculty working in the field of American Indian studies, and the state of Pennsylvania has no Indian reservations. As a result, students generally have no contact with the people they are studying. Because many have never met a Native American, they are prone to thinking of Indians as extinct. By getting students to look at archival materials from an indigenous perspective, they learn to think about such basic terms as “American,” “history,” “literature,” “knowledge,” and “writing” in new ways. Even if the students do not major in American Indian studies, the intellectual experience of understanding a very different cultural epistemology and ontology is inherently valuable.\n\nFrom a pedagogical perspective, the students learn research skills in archives that will serve them well no matter what careers they chose. In my experience, most undergraduates do not have the opportunity to work with archival or museum collections. Many students seem to enjoy the courses more once they have been to the American Philosophical Society and have seen Thomas Jefferson’s hand-written draft of the Declaration of Independence, or have held a drum owned by Sitting Bull in their hands. It makes history and culture come alive in a way that textbooks rarely do. I find that it requires a lot of preliminary work—selecting and skimming documents, scanning photographs, etc.—to prepare a class for doing research in the archives. This semester my students will be going through hundreds of pages of oral history transcripts about an Ojibwe Medicine Man. The students will try to match the transcripts to historical documents and photographs in order to make them more useful to the community in northern Manitoba, where the recordings were originally made more than seventy-five years ago. I find that the students’ work is more thoughtful and more inspired when they realize that it may possibly benefit Native Americans, rather than just be read by one person: me.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 2','The most obvious benefit to Penn students is the opportunity to work on a project designed to be used by Native American community members and to hear the voices of elders. Penn, unfortunately, has no Native American faculty working in the field of American Indian studies, and the state of Pennsylvania has no Indian reservations.','inherit','open','open','','1580-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 20:38:54','2013-04-18 20:38:54','',1580,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1580-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(3894,1,'2013-04-18 20:38:58','2013-04-18 20:38:58','I am fortunate to hold positions at three major cultural institutions in Philadelphia. I teach in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania, work as a Contributing Scholar at the Penn Museum, and, as Director of Native American Projects at the American Philosophical Society (APS), I oversee one of the finest collections of Native American archival materials in the country. I have directed three large grant projects at the APS to digitize images and audio recordings related to Native American culture. Once in digital form, the material becomes much more accessible to students. I am, therefore, in a unique position to provide my students with access to a wide variety of archival materials, many of which are linked in surprising ways.\n\nFor most of the twentieth century, Penn was home to some of the greatest anthropologists working on Native American cultures: Frank Speck, A. Irving Hallowell, Anthony F.C. Wallace, and Dell Hymes. All of these scholars gave their papers to the APS, while Speck and Hallowell also donated artifacts to the Penn Museum. The collections fit together very nicely, even though the institutions do not have a formal collaborative relationship. My Penn students thus have many opportunities to connect the two collections in a variety of interesting ways that are beneficial to the APS, the Penn Museum, and Native American communities.\n\nMuch of my own research involves how digital technology can strengthen outreach to Native American communities. I have overseen six grant projects that share the aim of returning digital surrogates of archival materials to their communities of origin. In 2005, I started a website entitled <em><a href=\"http://gibagadinamaagoom.info/\">Gibagadinamaagoom: An Ojibwe Digital Archive</a></em> that houses digital materials and is used by Ojibwe high school and tribal college students throughout the state of Minnesota. Several years later I started a sister site, <em><a href=\"http://www.sas.upenn.edu/dpic/\">Digital Partnerships with Indian Communities</a></em>, which allows the students to “publish” their work. When their work is polished enough, which usually entails some substantive editing, it is then made available to Native communities via the <em>Digital Partnerships</em> website. Both sites are designed with the Drupal content management system and are maintained by the School of Arts and Sciences Computing at Penn. This provides long-term sustainability. Because Drupal is so flexible, students can learn how to design digital exhibits that incorporate highlights of the archival materials and make them more accessible to Native communities. This requires training and outstanding students, many of whom receive grant support from Penn or other sources to work with me on these projects.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 1','I am fortunate to hold positions at three major cultural institutions in Philadelphia. I teach in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania, work as a Contributing Scholar at the Penn Museum, and, as Director of Native American Projects at the American Philosophical Society (APS), I oversee one of the finest collections of Native American archival materials in the country.','inherit','open','open','','1577-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 20:38:58','2013-04-18 20:38:58','',1577,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1577-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(3895,1,'2013-04-18 20:39:02','2013-04-18 20:39:02','Archival work <em>is</em> my curriculum. Integrating it into the broader university curriculum has been a long-term project. The year I started at Wesleyan, I began an intensive, perhaps even aggressive, approach to bringing classes into Special Collections &amp; Archives (SC&amp;A). The first step was to find a close connection between our holdings and Wesleyan’s curriculum. To do this, I studied the course catalog carefully and matched holdings to what was being taught. I wrote detailed letters to each faculty member whose course seemed to connect well to our holdings. Although I used the same basic form for each letter, I tailored each one with a specific list of items I would show to the class if they would come in for a visit. (At the time, a letter still had more impact than an email message.) In the first year alone, this effort resulted in twenty-four class sessions for nineteen different courses and a total of 276 students. As the program has grown, certain trends have emerged. Perhaps not surprisingly, the largest number of requests for class sessions comes from the American Studies, English, and History departments. Faculty in African American Studies; Astronomy; Classical Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Music; Romance Languages and Literatures; Science in Society; and Studio Art are regular participants as well. We have also hosted classes in atomic theory, computer science, dance, German, government, and sociology. By now, I have worked with upwards of one hundred different faculty members (including visitors and non-tenure-track faculty) to bring classes to SC&amp;A. This often includes helping them to design assignments that reinforce or build on the visit to SC&amp;A, while enhancing the pedagogical goals of the course and promoting the use of our collections. At this point, the program needs very little advertising to sustain itself, although I do still send reminders to some faculty to schedule a class visit, and I encourage new faculty to consider the possibility when our holdings are a good match for their courses.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 5','','inherit','open','open','','1571-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 20:39:02','2013-04-18 20:39:02','',1571,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1571-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3896,1,'2013-04-18 20:39:08','2013-04-18 20:39:08','The single biggest challenge my program faces is one of supply and demand. Demand for class sessions in Special Collections &amp; Archives (SC&amp;A) is increasing—all to the good!—but the supply of time for teaching is not. In this sense, we are the victims of our own success. More staff to share the teaching load would help. Increased use of digitized sources and online tutorials can help as well, and many institutions, both large and small, are exploring these options, some with considerable success. Digitization can help make our holdings more readily accessible to larger numbers of students. Naturally, care and preservation of materials that are heavily used is always a concern. Digitization helps to protect the originals from being damaged in the service of learning and scholarship, but the experience of using digital surrogates is not really the same as using the “real thing.” Best, of course, is when the original and a digital surrogate can be used in tandem.\n\nOften faculty find it difficult to squeeze a visit to SC&amp;A into an already full syllabus, even when it is pedagogically desirable. Scheduling extra sessions outside of regular class meetings can be complex in the extreme, since students are extraordinarily busy with academic and extracurricular commitments.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 4','','inherit','open','open','','1568-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 20:39:08','2013-04-18 20:39:08','',1568,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1568-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3897,1,'2013-04-18 20:39:22','2013-04-18 20:39:22','From 50,000 feet up, my greatest success is developing our program of outreach and teaching, and sustaining it over nearly fifteen years. In 1997-98, seven classes visited Special Collections &amp; Archives. Last semester, I taught thirty-one class sessions. The numbers document the faculty’s growing interest in bringing their classes to SC&amp;A and the success of our outreach. The value and enrichment to the curriculum and the students are, of course, harder to quantify.\n\nThe best, most rewarding experiences for me personally are those in which I can see the collections really come alive for students, when they come back to use our materials even when they are not required to do so, and when their enthusiasm for archives and special collections is clearly evident. There are many examples. At the most basic level, I know that students are engaged when they show up with their parents during our open house at Homecoming/Family Weekend, and they tell their families enthusiastically about their visit with an introductory astronomy class in which they saw, among other items, some of Einstein’s manuscripts and artists’ books with astronomical themes. This is a perfect example of how even the “dog and pony show” can reach students and provide a memorable experience. At the other end of the spectrum, some students find materials first encountered in a class visit so intriguing that they spend a full year (or sometimes more) researching them as the focus of a senior thesis. In recent years we have had excellent theses centered on a sixteenth-century German prayer book, a Shakespeare folio with eighteenth-century annotations, Civil War letters written by a Wesleyan alumnus, and the papers of a faculty member from the 1930s-50s, to name a few. In all of these cases, students have done high-level, truly original research that was sparked during a visit to SC&amp;A.\n\nThere are non-curricular peak experiences as well. From time to time, students use the University Archives to research family members who attended Wesleyan in the past. These projects are often exciting in a deeply personal way for both the students and their families. Perhaps the most memorable search for a Wesleyan ancestor ended up with a student weeping in our reading room. She had found yearbook pictures and evidence of a vibrant social and intellectual life of a grandfather she had never known because he had committed suicide before she was born. It is hard for me to imagine an archival experience more moving than this. Still, there have been many times over the years when students’ connections—intellectual, emotional, or both—with our holdings have been deeply gratifying to me.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 3','','inherit','open','open','','1565-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 20:39:22','2013-04-18 20:39:22','',1565,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1565-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3898,1,'2013-04-18 20:39:27','2013-04-18 20:39:27','Engagement is a clear benefit. Many students are visibly excited, even awed, by their first visit to our Davison Rare Book Room, where the class sessions take place. The room is itself beautiful, echoing an eighteenth-century English gentleman’s library with glass-fronted bookcases and walnut paneling. The setting, combined with the intriguing materials presented, often inspires students to focus especially closely on the objects on display. The “wow” factor helps to make the experience memorable. While the visit to Special Collections &amp; Archives (SC&amp;A)and attendant procedures (such as signing in, only using pencils, stowing bags, etc.) could easily be intimidating for some students, we work hard to ensure that the department is welcoming and friendly so that students feel encouraged to return on their own.\n\nPedagogically and intellectually, first-hand encounters with special collections and archives facilitate students’ thinking outside the box as they identify and pursue research topics. Direct contact with primary sources can fuel students’ interests, and many students find captivating the detective work involved in teasing out meanings from unedited and unglossed documents. Learning about the history and technology of the book opens students’ eyes to aspects of texts that can be far less evident with the ubiquitous electronic sources and secondary readings that fuel so much of their research. Through studying rare books and other special collections, students begin to understand that marginalia, provenance, typography, design, binding, and illustrations—all the physical aspects of specific copies of a book—offer avenues for viewing the book in the context of its own time. They begin to appreciate the many people beside the author who helped create the physical book. Often the study of these aspects of books helps to frame the text in such a way that students can step outside of themselves to evaluate it and analyze it, not just from a twenty-first-century point of view, but within the intellectual and historical context of its own time.\n\nOf course the active use of SC&amp;A by undergraduates benefits the department and the library as well. The deep integration of SC&amp;A into Wesleyan’s curriculum helps to ensure that we are not marginalized, that we are truly part of the University’s academic community, and that the materials are well (albeit carefully) used. As circulating collections and electronic resources in academic libraries become more homogenous, the strengths of archives and special collections holdings are often what distinguish an academic library from its peers at other institutions.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 2','','inherit','open','open','','1562-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 20:39:27','2013-04-18 20:39:27','',1562,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1562-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3899,1,'2013-04-18 20:39:44','2013-04-18 20:39:44','Since I came to Wesleyan nearly fifteen years ago, a key focus of my job has been outreach to the faculty, and thus the undergraduates, through the curriculum. To this end, I teach thirty-five to fifty class sessions each academic year in Special Collections &amp; Archives (SC&amp;A). Disciplines range from astronomy to writing, and just about everything in between.\n\nThough all class sessions have the common goal of raising undergraduate awareness of and interest in the holdings of SC&amp;A, each class presentation is different, based on both the subject of the course and the pedagogical purpose for which the materials will be used. Some sessions take a classic “dog and pony show” approach in which I, or sometimes the professor and I, present a group of interesting materials from our collections and talk briefly about each item, how it connects to the course, and/or how it might be used in the students’ research. In other sessions, students take a more active role by doing an in-class assignment. One such assignment we often use is the “mystery book exercise” that a History of Science faculty member and I developed together. “Mystery book” is a fun, fast-paced exercise that trains students to evaluate an unfamiliar source quickly and teaches information-literacy skills using books or documents connected to the subject of the course. After spending a few minutes looking at a book they have not seen before, students answer ten questions, which range from the (usually) easy identification of the author to more complex considerations of how the mystery book might inform their research. Still other classes use the visit to SC&amp;A to prepare for an in-depth paper or project that requires, or at least strongly encourages, the use of materials in SC&amp;A. These longer assignments are as varied as the classes, and they include traditional term papers, documentary editing projects, artists’ books, and creative writing based on primary sources, among others. For the full list of mystery book questions, other assignments, and comments from Wesleyan professors who use SC&amp;A in teaching, see the online exhibition, <em><a href=\"http://oldbooks.site.wesleyan.edu/\">Old Books, New Pedagogy: Special Collections and Archives in the Curriculum</a></em>.\n\nOf course, not all the work I do with undergraduates is teaching them about archives and special collections in class settings. Often class visits spark students to use SC&amp;A for other courses, senior theses or essays, co-curricular activities, or just simple personal interest. In many of these cases, I work one-on-one with the students to help them identify relevant materials, focus topics, find related books or documents, and understand the context, all of which are typical functions of reference and instruction librarians.\n\nMuch of my recent professional activity has focused on teaching undergraduates to use archives and special collections. I have just co-edited a volume of case studies on this topic, entitled <em>Past or Portal? Enhancing Undergraduate Learning through Special Collections and Archives</em>. The book, which was<a href=\"http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=3828\"> recently published by the Association of College and Research Libraries</a>, contains nearly fifty real-life examples of undergraduate curricular uses of archives and special collections in a wide variety of institutions.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 1','','inherit','open','open','','1558-revision-7','','','2013-04-18 20:39:44','2013-04-18 20:39:44','',1558,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1558-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(3900,1,'2013-04-18 20:49:24','2013-04-18 20:49:24','In addition to what I have already addressed, I will just add that if you want to include archival work in your courses, you need to work closely with your librarians. Before you assume that students can have access to any rare materials, or that they can take notes on a rare book, or compare multiple manuscripts, check your special collections’ policies. And before you assume that your library does or does not have material relevant to your course, talk with the librarians. You might be surprised to learn that some books are too fragile to be handled, for instance, or that there is a large number of books relevant to the history of science in the 1700s. No one knows a special collection better than its librarians, and they are your first resource and your first ally in making archival work relevant to your curriculum.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 5','','inherit','open','open','','1553-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 20:49:24','2013-04-18 20:49:24','',1553,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1553-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3901,1,'2013-04-18 21:00:43','2013-04-18 21:00:43','The first set of challenges is logistical. Bringing students into the Library changed some of the Library’s usual operating procedures and has made me adjust some of my own habits of teaching. The Undergraduate Program was the first time the Library allowed undergraduates into the Library to conduct research in any sort of ongoing basis. (There is an established fellowship for Amherst students that brings two or three students down to do research at the Library for a couple of weeks each year, but the intense use of rare materials and the duration of the fellowship are significantly different from the structure of the Undergraduate Seminars.) Even though the Library was supportive of my program and eager to help adjust policy, understandably there was some concern about how needy the students would be: Would they require a lot of supervision? Would they be asking for a lot of assistance? Would they be disruptive to the other readers? (The answer to all of these is no. In part because of the intensive training they receive in the classroom about how to handle books and how to find the resources they need, the students are in many ways better prepared to work in the Reading Rooms than many others!) There were also procedural questions that needed to be resolved. Before my program, rare materials were not routinely brought into the Library’s classrooms and were never handled by non-staff members in classrooms. Putting together a new policy on classroom use (how many items, how they could and could not be handled, the number of staff members necessary to supervise, etc.) was vital. And it was not difficult, thanks to the supportive curatorial staff. I did have to adjust my own teaching style. My preference is to decide what I am going to do in any given class as I go along. I might decide to try a particular approach the day before class, if my sense of how the class is proceeding suggests it. But I cannot decide at the last minute to bring a set of rare books into the seminar room because curators need to vet the rare materials in advance. That is not a big obstacle, but it has required me to adjust.\n\nA bigger challenge has been getting used to not having all the answers. My students come from a wide range of majors: English and history, to be sure, but I have also taught majors in French, theology, art history, music, drama, medieval studies, physics, and economics. And because I let them choose any work that was printed before 1700 for their research project, students often choose works that I have never heard of. What this means is that I need to learn along with them. A student working on <em>Utopia</em> is fairly easy; a student working on a Czech herbal (a book describing plants and their medicinal properties) is a lot harder to guide. But this is also a challenge that is fun and beneficial: if I knew everything, I’d be bored and my students wouldn’t have room for discovery.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 4','','inherit','open','open','','1550-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 21:00:43','2013-04-18 21:00:43','',1550,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1550-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3902,1,'2013-04-18 21:00:39','2013-04-18 21:00:39','Oh my, this is a hard one to answer. Without intending to sound unbearably sappy, there are nearly too many moments of success for me to count! My favorite moments are those that come outside the seminar: when a student makes a connection between what we have been discussing and what another class of hers is doing; when a professor tells me that a former student has been teaching them all to pay attention to the textual history of a poem they are reading; or when a former student sends me an e-mail to point out a newspaper article about books he found interesting. All those moments mean that the lessons they have learned in our seminar are living on for them in other contexts.\n\nOther favorite moments have been when students have found something out about a book that is news to the Library’s catalogers. Given how tremendous the Folger catalogers are, that is hard to do! But, for instance, one student was working on <em>The essayes of a prentise</em>, a book that had been written by King James in 1594, when he was James VI of Scotland and not yet James I of England. The student’s interpretation of the book was that it was deeply embedded in James’s perspective as a Scottish monarch and aspirant to the English throne, especially since the book was bound as a presentation copy for Lord Burghley. But the catalog record for the book, following standard name authority rules, listed the author as James I. Given the student’s research, however, the book’s record now includes a note clarifying the nature of James’s title when it was written. (You can see a blog post I wrote about the book and this issue <a href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/2009/09/essayes-of-a-prentise/\">here</a>; you can find the catalog record for it <a href=\"http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=163210\">here</a>.)\n\nAnother student was working on James Smith’s <em>The generall historie of Virginia</em> (1624) and was struck by its odd binding, in which one armorial device was stamped on top of another. The Folger’s catalog identified one of them as James I’s, but it took some joint sleuthing for her and I to work out that the stamp on top of James’s was that of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. As far as I can work out, no one else had noticed that, not the previous owners, the booksellers, or the Library’s catalogers. (That record still does not include the additional information about the binding because I have not yet brought it to their attention. But you can read about the book and see some pictures of the binding <a href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/2011/04/an-armorial-binding-mystery/\">here</a>; the catalog record is <a href=\"http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=164134\">here</a>.)','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 3','','inherit','open','open','','1547-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 21:00:39','2013-04-18 21:00:39','',1547,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1547-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3903,1,'2013-04-18 21:00:35','2013-04-18 21:00:35','I think the biggest benefit of bringing students into special collections through this course is that students own the process of discovery. In many undergraduate humanities courses, students learn about a subject through reading about it and, sometimes, conducting research on a topic of their choosing. But their research is rarely significant in terms of discovering new knowledge or generating a new perspective on something. Anyone who has taught a Shakespeare course can attest to the fact that even the best student papers do not often contribute something new to the field of Shakespeare studies; they might be interesting, and insightful, and they might be genuinely exciting to the student, but they are not new. But when students work with primary materials in special collections, they can be working with something that no one else has considered before. Sure, many people have written about More’s <em>Utopia</em>, but no one else may have produced a history of the particular copy of the third English edition of his book, which can now be found at the Folger with the call number STC 18096 Copy 1. More importantly, I have not done that either. In creating the biographies of their books, students are on their own, doing utterly original research. I can provide guidance, and so can generations of scholars before them, but students will not have that sinking feeling of realizing that somebody else has already written what they want to say, and has written it better.\n\nThat ownership of their research shifts how students see themselves as scholars. They are each experts on their own book, and everyone teaches everyone else when it comes to sharing insights into the nature of the book trade, the shape of authorship, or the variety of book use. Students produce long research papers on their final biographies, having revised earlier drafts, rethought their assumptions, and spent countless hours in the Library and at home working through their books’ stories. There is a consistent level of engagement with the material that I have not seen in other advanced-level seminars I have taught. Their papers routinely go above and beyond the expectations I have set for the projects; I have learned to suggest word limits as minimum expectations, not maximum cut-offs, since when I ask for a 3000-word paper, there are always students who have produced such rich research that they need 5000 words to do it justice.\n\nI suppose some might question the scholarly benefit of pouring all that energy into one copy of one edition of one book. But by limiting their attention to one copy, students have the room to fully explore the range of connections and complications for that book, and with that knowledge, students are able to extrapolate to the production of other books and to the ways in which knowledge passes from one generation to the next. The history of who read and collected the 1597 English <em>Utopia</em> over the centuries sheds light on our reading and use of the text today. More importantly, the skills students learn exploring one book can be used to explore any book, even a book made after the hand-press period. And because students are genuinely excited by the sense of discovery, they absorb and retain those ideas, bringing them to their other courses and to their lives following graduation. Being able to discover and to be real scholars as undergraduates opens up doors to them long after our class is done.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 2','','inherit','open','open','','1544-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 21:00:35','2013-04-18 21:00:35','',1544,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1544-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3904,1,'2013-04-18 21:00:31','2013-04-18 21:00:31','I am the director of the Undergraduate Program at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a program I created five years ago. It consists of two semester-long seminars in which students from universities in the D.C. area come to the Library to study book history and early modern culture. The goal of the seminars is for students to expand their knowledge of the period and their research skills by working directly with rare materials in the context of book history. The course is divided into three thematic concerns: books as physical objects (descriptive bibliography), the relationship between books and cultural forces (print culture), and books as vehicles for text (editorial theory and practice). By moving from how books are made to the economics of authorship and readers’ uses of books to how their manifestation in print affects books’ meanings, the course models different approaches to studying the histories of books and strives to explore how each approach is related to others. The class as a whole reads secondary sources (Darnton, McKenzie, McLeod, Sherman, Lesser), and class discussions make frequent use of rare materials brought into the classroom.  (The current syllabus for the course can be found <a title=\"Book and Early Modern Culture Syllabus\" href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/FolgerBooks\">here</a>.) When we discuss how books are printed, for instance, I will bring books into class that illustrate moments where the printing went askew—a misfoliated book, perhaps—in order to learn what the evidence of these mistakes can teach us about the process of making a book. Or we will devote a session to looking at bibles from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in order to see how their physical appearance changes, to explore how physical characteristics suggest different ways to read and use the bibles, and to examine what they might reveal about cultural and religious battles.\n\nWhile the class works together on these discussions, each student is studying one book that they have chosen to focus on. With their own book, they research its makers (authors, translators, and compilers as well as printers, publishers, and booksellers), its intended audience, and its later users and collectors. At the end of the semester, each student produces a biography of their book using their primary research and the book’s physical characteristics to tell its life story, from its inception to its afterlife as both text and object.\n\nIn both of these ways, working with rare materials is integral to the course and to the students’ learning experiences. Students in the class are Readers at the Library on the same terms that any other scholar given a Reader’s Card is: they can use any of the modern and rare materials in our collections that are not normally restricted. They come to the Library weekly for the seminar and return to the Library regularly to conduct their research for the class. Their Reader’s Cards are good for twelve months, so students can return to the Library after the seminar is done to carry on their own research. In other words, through the Undergraduate Seminar, students learn not only to use rare materials in their studies, but to be citizens of rare materials libraries.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 1','','inherit','open','open','','1541-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 21:00:31','2013-04-18 21:00:31','',1541,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1541-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3905,1,'2013-04-18 21:00:27','2013-04-18 21:00:27','As an undergraduate I felt like the archive primed me to search for pristine differences between the past and present. It was as if the past was a foreign country I was visiting while in the archive and that I had to translate into a more modern language. Yet the evidence I worked with was rarely so easily explained on the page. Similarities across time were often differences in addition, illustrating the messiness of historiography. There was also the logistical challenge of gauging the depth of a semester-long archival project. I had the classic Goldilocks problem of finding a research question that was neither too big nor too small.\n\nThe added obstacle is that undergraduates rarely devote their time to academics as faithfully as graduate students and faculty do. As an undergraduate I was juggling internships, part-time jobs, and community service with my class work. Before I started my undergraduate archival work, I usually resolved the logistical tangles by relegating reading and writing to the wee morning hours. When I needed to start visiting collections around New York City, this was not so easy. I started setting aside time to commute uptown to the New York Public Library, for example, while giving myself enough time to grab lunch and get back downtown for class.\n\nThe challenge was manageable on a practical level, but also on a conceptual one. Undergraduates—and I include myself when I was one—tend to think that setting aside business hours for internships will help develop the practical skills necessary for landing the perfect job after graduation. And there is no denying that internships can be useful in teaching the rigors of the workplace. But when we design courses for undergraduates, requiring them to spend time actively engaged in searching and <em>re</em>-searching, the pace and tenor of undergraduate study changes. For me, substituting work done alone, late at night in my apartment, for the work of talking with librarians, archivists, and other experts was a far more meaningful undergraduate experience, and something that was actually easily marketable for a job interview.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 5','As an undergraduate I felt like the archive primed me to search for pristine differences between the past and present. It was as if the past was a foreign country I was visiting while in the archive and that I had to translate into a more modern language. Yet the evidence I worked with was rarely so easily explained on the page.','inherit','open','open','','1536-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 21:00:27','2013-04-18 21:00:27','',1536,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1536-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3906,1,'2013-04-18 21:00:05','2013-04-18 21:00:05','Doing undergraduate archival work can be like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. In most classes, the readings and discussions act as essential compasses in guiding the student through the semester. In the archive, most, if not all, bets are off; rarely are there already made tutorials on organizing and making sense of the productive entropy that often marks an archive. How are we to situate a newly discovered text if we have not even finished our undergraduate prerequisite courses?\n\nFor me, the most challenging moments in the archive were the earliest, both because I was adjusting to the demands of archival methods and because I had only a small number of anchoring texts echoing in my head to help me make sense of anything I found. In fact, I probably missed a number of promising leads in the archive because I did not know to look for them.\n\nA good friend and I won a small grant at NYU for a research project about marginalia. We were to trace the marginalia of a particular ancient religious text, the <em>Hermes Trismegistus</em>. While I was scouring libraries in Paris for the history of the text’s early translation, my partner was in New York looking for evidence of contemporary readers’ marks on the book. My job was to plot the ancient scribbles, which seemed easy enough before I actually entered the stacks (see Figure 3). I was looking for the text itself while piecing together others’ accounts of the its migrations. <span class=\"caption right\" style=\"width: 200px; padding-left: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig3.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2333 \" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"gotkin_fig3\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig3-190x250.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 3\" width=\"190\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 3: Depiction of the god Hermes Trismegistus (courtesy of Roanoke College)</span>\n\nAs it turns out, the <em>Hermes Trismegistus</em> is an enduringly baffling historical object and its ancestry is riddled with gaps. A more experienced researcher would know how to explain this fitful history and perhaps use the inconsistencies and question marks as launching pads for substantive contributions. But since it was my first time in the archive for a sustained and labor-intensive project, they instead weighed on me like chains. Not only did I have trouble tracing the marginalia themselves, I had trouble explaining how I was having trouble.\n\nI realize now that this situation is not so much overcome with academic training as it is more efficiently handled with it. That moment of chaos and crisis is in fact a prerequisite to clear thinking, in my experience. As an undergraduate I was overwhelmed by the disorder of the archival process; but then again, these troubles might have been the best training.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 4','Doing undergraduate archival work can be like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. In most classes, the readings and discussions act as essential compasses in guiding the student through the semester. In the archive, most, if not all, bets are off; rarely are there already made tutorials on organizing and making sense of the productive entropy that often marks an archive.','inherit','open','open','','1533-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 21:00:05','2013-04-18 21:00:05','',1533,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1533-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3907,1,'2013-04-18 21:00:02','2013-04-18 21:00:02','In one of my undergraduate courses a professor handed out a checklist for good archival research. The last item on the list was simply, “Get lucky.” My most meaningful archival work has indeed come out of the pleasures of spelunking in archives, hoping to come upon a hidden gem. In my junior year of college I studied abroad in Paris, where I took a class on global media structures. As many graduate-level courses require, the final paper was an individual research project rather than a paper based on class readings and discussions. I knew that my home department in New York offered a course called “Hacker Culture &amp; Politics,” which I ended up taking as soon as I returned. In anticipation of that course, I contacted the professor, Biella Coleman, to ask if she had any contacts in Paris who were working on hacking. After a series of e-mail introductions through friends of friends, I got in touch with the head of a hacker space just outside of Paris.\n<span class=\"caption right\" style=\"width: 200px; margin-left: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig2.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2332\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"gotkin_fig2\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig2-199x250.png\" alt=\"Figure 2\" width=\"199\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 2: Example of a typical French hacker e-zine c. 1994</span>\n\nAlthough I originally intended to study a contemporary aspect of hacking, I ended up with a historical project. After talking with a few French hackers on Internet Relay Chat, it became clear that the early French hacker scene was highly ritualized around electronic magazines, or e-zines. Ultimately, I wrote the paper based on research from about seventy different e-zines sent over digital bulletin board systems and the nascent Internet (see Figure 2). Getting access to the e-zines was not easy, and in the end, I amassed my own archive. Mine was not the image of the archive-as-dungeon, but instead the archive-as-disk-space. Perhaps as difficult to catalog and maintain as any rare book collection (if not more so), the e-zines I collected were infinitely reproducible and accessible from anywhere, even after I left France.\n\nArchival practices change when the historical subject is itself born digital. The challenge of marshaling evidence around a research question is no less important, but the dematerialized archive demands new techniques of investigation. What happens, for example, when we can do archival research from a coffee shop? The absence of the physical walls in a traditional archive might become a new figurative challenge. What is archival work if the archivist is not literally surrounded by material? These are the questions that productively vex my research. Creating the digital archive has been my greatest success because it provided me with a set of substantive and methodological questions that continue to complicate and broaden my research years later.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 3','In one of my undergraduate courses a professor handed out a checklist for good archival research. The last item on the list was simply, “Get lucky.” My most meaningful archival work has indeed come out of the pleasures of spelunking in archives, hoping to come upon a hidden gem. In my junior year of college I studied abroad in Paris, where I took a class on global media structures.','inherit','open','open','','1530-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 21:00:02','2013-04-18 21:00:02','',1530,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1530-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3908,1,'2013-04-18 20:59:57','2013-04-18 20:59:57','My experience in the archive directly contributed to my interest in graduate school, which is perhaps unsurprising when you think about the demands of archival work. The move from undergraduate to graduate study shares the guiding principles of archival work. You must first learn what others have said, before delving into the topics that demand further examination. Archival research, in this sense, is the never-ending game of hide-and-seek with that perfect research subject we yen for in each new project, class, and semester.\n\nAside from its importance in training future scholars, archival work is significant even for students who have less professional allegiance to the academy. Original research is a principle worth incorporating in undergraduate course design, as it signifies the marketable job-placement skills that supposedly evidence proper university training. In the 1997 <em>Harper’s Magazine</em> essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education,” Mark Edmundson suggests undergraduate study has become “lite entertainment for bored college students.” He writes, “University culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images.”<sup><a href=\"#_ftn1\">[1]</a></sup> Edmundson goes on to argue that the transactional nature of undergraduate study creates an imbalance between what professors put into a syllabus and what students get out of it. But if we think about archival research as a process of skill development, it just may serve as a corrective to the literal and figurative banking of education.\n\nArchival work is often thought to be methodologically opposed to new media research techniques; thus, the theory goes, undergraduates, as “digital natives,” must learn and maintain a skill set in the archive apart from their new media literacy. How, for example, should undergraduates be expected to navigate the thick mess of a paper archive when Facebook and Twitter are their daily information grounds, where information streams are updated automatically and search boxes are never further than the top of the page? If the job market is increasingly concerned with social media, why should students spend time poring over “dead” technologies? Contrary to the notion that the archive and new media are irreconcilable, we might instead think of them as complementary educational forces. It is no coincidence, for example, that undergraduates in the archive are more likely to be keen and discerning arbiters of information.\n<div class=\"footnotes\">\n<div id=\"_ftn1\" class=\"footnote\">[1] Mark Edmundson, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” <em>Harper’s Magazine</em>, September 1997, 40.</div>\n<div></div>\n</div>','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 2','My experience in the archive directly contributed to my interest in graduate school, which is perhaps unsurprising when you think about the demands of archival work. The move from undergraduate to graduate study shares the guiding principles of archival work. ','inherit','open','open','','1527-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 20:59:57','2013-04-18 20:59:57','',1527,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1527-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3909,1,'2013-04-18 20:59:54','2013-04-18 20:59:54','A few years ago, I was an undergraduate in the archive. In a class called “Dead Media Research Studio” at New York University (NYU), Professor Ben Kafka introduced me to the great quip about the chiasmic imperative of good research: to “make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” With this echoing in my ears, I found myself in the entrails of Bobst Library interviewing two preservation specialists about a small but intriguing collection of wire recordings. The recordings, I found out, were of rather unknown origins in the early 1950s and contained some controversial tirades against President Truman. Though certainly not an exhaustive archive, the recordings provided me with my first meaningful interaction with historical primary sources. And it was a rather lonely endeavor; the hallways leading to troves of under-researched sources were woefully empty compared to the bustling study lounges located just a few floors above.\n\nMy research on wire recordings ended up as part of a dossier (similar to the format and scope of a Wikipedia entry) I wrote with two classmates for the Dead Media Archive. Professors Ben Kafka and Alex Galloway had rescued this archive from its own ironic demise as an e-mail list created by Bruce Sterling to catalog and describe obsolete technologies. The new Dead Media Archive, technically a wiki platform for simultaneous publishing and editing, became the centerpiece for two classes in the Department of Media, Culture, &amp; Communication (one undergraduate and one graduate). The semester in which I took the class, there were barely ten students enrolled. It puzzled me a bit, since Professor Kafka announced on the first day what every undergraduate seems to dream of hearing: there would be no exams, no papers, and very little reading. Instead, we were to be immersed in the city’s archives for a semester. Each student ended up producing three dossiers for the archive. In addition to one on wire recording, I also wrote an entry on spirit photography, a popular turn-of-the-century practice of “capturing” ghosts on film, which was accompanied by the rise of Spiritualism. A sizeable portion of my hard drive is still taken up by copies of the microform proceedings of the 1869 trial against William Mumler, a New York City spirit photographer accused of fraud (see Figure 1). My final dossier presented a more argumentative take on the “death” of media by cataloging marginalia, the scribbles in a text’s margins, as obsolete relics of a technological paradigm.<span class=\"caption right\" style=\"width: 200px; padding-left: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig1.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2331 alignright\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"gotkin_fig1\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig1-193x250.png\" alt=\"Figure 1\" width=\"193\" height=\"250\" /></a>Figure 1: Microform copy of the proceedings of a 1869 court case against spirit photographer William Mumler.</span>\n\nBefore arriving at NYU, I would have scoffed at the idea of studying media history. There was much sighing on my first day in the required “History of Communication” course; I imagined, like many fellow undergraduates, that a degree in media studies would help me land a job in New York’s radio, television, or film industries. History, for us, was a roadblock in the path to careers less concerned with the past than with the frenetic present. The thrill of finding primary sources changed my mind. In the archive, I realized the opportunity to conduct original research. The excitement of archival work is shared by undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike; it is the thrill of finding something that has not been thought about enough, and then working hard enough to make it both familiar and strange.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 1','','inherit','open','open','','1528-revision-5','','','2013-04-18 20:59:54','2013-04-18 20:59:54','',1528,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1528-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3910,1,'2013-04-18 20:59:49','2013-04-18 20:59:49','<em>The Vodou Archive</em> is being unveiled currently (spring of 2012) in my course “Introduction to Haitian Vodou.” On a weekly basis, different parts of the archive will be highlighted and students will be expected to visit the digital library to read or view the assigned materials. In order to stress the importance of <em>The Vodou Archive</em> as a digital library, I will also require that students write essays about some of its components. As Florida has numerous active Vodou communities, students will be encouraged to produce materials for the archive, such as photographs or recordings from Vodou ceremonies and rituals.\n\nThe work undertaken in collaboration with undergraduates to produce <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> has been integrated into the curriculum in numerous ways. For example, students are assigned reading materials that spring from the collaboration. Based on the topics selected for essays, students are encouraged to read or examine parts of <em>The Vodou Archive.</em> For example, students who want to write about how Catholic chromolithographs camouflage Vodou <em>lwa</em> (spirits) are encouraged to visit the selection in <em>The Vodou Archive</em> (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/AA00008694/allvolumes2\" target=\"_blank\">click here</a>); other students might need photographic data about Vodou (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/AA00005507/00001/thumbs\" target=\"_blank\">click here</a>); other students may need to consult important but hard-to-find works such as Arthur Holly’s (1928) <em>Dra-po</em> (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/UF00076958\" target=\"_blank\">click here</a>); finally, some students will want to listen to rare recordings made by Maya Deren held exclusively by <em>The Vodou Archive</em> (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/UF00082017\" target=\"_blank\">click here</a>). <em>The Vodou Archive</em> is rich and diverse assemblage of documents; while not all of it can be directly included in the curriculum for all students, individual students are encouraged to branch into the parts of the archive that are relevant to their own work.\n\nAnother way that I will increase student contributions to <em>The Vodou Archive</em> will be through the creation of <em>The Vodou Journal</em>, a planned dimension of the digital archive: ten of the students’ best essays will be submitted to <em>The Vodou Journal</em> for peer review and possible publication. I hope that this unique opportunity for undergraduates to make a significant contribution to the scholarship on Vodou will also stimulate greater attention to writing and introduce undergraduates to the process of scholarly publishing in general.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 5','<em>The Vodou Archive</em> is being unveiled currently (spring of 2012) in my course “Introduction to Haitian Vodou.” On a weekly basis, different parts of the archive will be highlighted and students will be expected to visit the digital library to read or view the assigned materials.  In order to stress the importance of <em>The Vodou Archive</em> as a digital library, I will also require that students write essays about some of its components.','inherit','open','open','','1516-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:59:49','2013-04-18 20:59:49','',1516,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1516-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3911,1,'2013-04-18 20:59:46','2013-04-18 20:59:46','The major challenges in writing and editing <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the profusion of variant spelling systems found in Haitian Creole until 1980. Most Haitian-Americans I work with at the University of Florida have limited exposure to written Haitian Creole prior to enrolling in my courses. After a year of intermediate Haitian Creole, it is still typical to misspell certain words. Given that the source texts they work from routinely employ spelling conventions that are no longer current, it is also common for undergraduate research assistants to reproduce the outdated spelling, especially in the cases of words that refer to concepts that are unfamiliar to them. The source text in (a) below, taken from scholar Milo Marcelin (1950), illustrates the base from which transcription (b) and translation (c) were produced:\n\n(a)\n<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/figure_a.png\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3242\" title=\"figure_a\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/figure_a.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"252\" height=\"70\" /></a>\n<table width=\"70%\" border=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"3\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td>(b)</td>\n<td>(c)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Danbala Wèdo se koulèv dlo!</td>\n<td>Danbala Wèdo is the water snake!</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Chèche Danbala, ki bò w a wè li?</td>\n<td>Look for Danbala, where will you see him?</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Papa Danbala se koulèv dlo,</td>\n<td>Papa Danbala is the water snake,</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td>li plonje anba dlo!</td>\n<td>he dives under water!</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n\nIn texts like this one, it is common for research assistants to import uncorrected words like <em>Oueddo</em>, or to accidently retain the “c” or the unpronounced “e” in <em>coulève </em>instead of writing the official <em>koulèv</em>. This impacted my work, as it required me to extensively edit the students’ work and send it back for review and correction; while it was labor intensive, the feedback provided the students with the opportunity to master the transcription of Haitian Creole and the translation into English. Students will learn from their mistakes if they can see what they are and have the chance to correct them. It is also common for students to import erroneous grammatical analyses by writing “<em>wa</em>” following <em>oua</em> (in line two), a minor confusion in which separate words are conflated. The correct representation of <em>oua </em>is “<em>w a</em>” (“you will” or “will you,” when used interrogatively as in the above). As senior editor, I had the challenge of constantly encountering examples of outdated spellings that research assistants had unwittingly imported into their transcription.\n\nThe quality of the undergraduates’ work varied widely. The nuances of the mythology, the “cryptic tricksterism” of Vodou semantics, and the rich—and obscure—idioms, expressions, and conceptualizations of the Haitian Creole language meant that all the texts required years of refinement through the editorial process, which is based upon countless critical re-readings from various points of view.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn4\">[8]</a></sup> Thus, working with undergraduates is rewarding but requires mentoring and patience due to their limited experience.\n<div class=\"footnotes\">\n<div id=\"_ftn8\" class=\"footnote\">[8] Karen McCarthy Brown, “Plenty Confidence in Myself: The Initiation of a White Woman Scholar into Haitian Vodou,” <em>Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion</em> 3, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 67–76, 74.</div>\n</div>','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 4','The major challenges in writing and editing <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the profusion of variant spelling systems found in Haitian Creole until 1980. Most Haitian-Americans I work with at the University of Florida have limited exposure to written Haitian Creole prior to enrolling in my courses.','inherit','open','open','','1513-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:59:46','2013-04-18 20:59:46','',1513,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1513-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3912,1,'2013-04-18 20:59:24','2013-04-18 20:59:24','The positive responses I received from publishers reinforced my sense that this project would be viable. In addition to this standard measure of academic success, the project itself was very successful as an intellectual and practical collaboration. The undergraduate collaborators worked vigorously and productively, helping to quickly advance the project. Vodou religion itself is a communal phenomenon. Likewise, I want the book and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> to express the unity of our collaboration as a means of ensuring accuracy through multiple voices and perspectives. Plus, as someone who was not raised within Vodou religion, I sensed that my scholarship on Haitian religion and its primary language, Haitian Creole, would benefit from extensive refereeing from a wide variety of informants: from <em>oungan </em>(priests), <em>manbo </em>(priestesses), <em>bòkò </em>(diviners), <em>ounsi</em> (initiates), scholars of all stripes, students in my classes, and the students directly involved in the project. As sharp intellectuals in their own right, these students participated in a triangular working methodology (my students, Vodou practitioners, and me) that helped ensure quality. They lent their talents to correcting, fashioning, and polishing the final product. The book and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the direct result of sharing texts and ideas through cooperative study, writing, and editing. As several students have native command of Haitian Creole, they were able to bring their deep knowledge and instincts of the language to the tasks I assigned them. Overall, it is the friendship and collegiality of working with people from all walks of life, and the experience of discovery, that has made, and continues to make, this project a great success for me. Writing and editing for academics is often a solitary activity. Working with undergraduate research assistants transformed the experience into a textual conversation about the nature and design of Vodou religion.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 3','The positive responses I received from publishers reinforced my sense that this project would be viable.  In addition to this standard measure of academic success, the project itself was very successful as an intellectual and practical collaboration. The undergraduate collaborators worked vigorously and productively, helping to quickly advance the project. Vodou religion itself is a communal phenomenon. ','inherit','open','open','','1510-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:59:24','2013-04-18 20:59:24','',1510,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1510-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3913,1,'2013-04-18 20:59:20','2013-04-18 20:59:20','There were many benefits to working with these undergraduates. The undergraduates chosen to work on this project were balanced bilinguals who demonstrated robust literacy in English and Haitian Creole, which I was able to assess since they had taken my intermediate Haitian Creole course. Florida has a large Haitian-American population that is second only to New York. In my position at the University of Florida, I instruct a significant number of Haitians and Haitian-Americans who have an advanced command of spoken and written Haitian Creole. Due to this strength, it is only natural to cultivate and tap into these talents for the benefit of their professional development and for the momentum of this project. As Haitian Creole is the third most spoken language in Florida after English and Spanish, developing advanced literacy in the language benefits employment prospects and it empowers individuals to seek out unique knowledge that exists only in Haitian Creole. Bilingual and biliterate candidates for employment in Florida’s healthcare industry, tourism industry, government, the law enforcement and judiciary system, transportation, and a host of other industries stand out next to their monolingual peers. Mastery of literacy in two languages is beneficial because knowledge can be acquired and shared via different mediums; individuals with these skills can facilitate communication, accuracy, and productivity.\n\nComplex and large projects like <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em>—projects that overlap with specialized aspects of culture and language—are best done, I think, in collaboration with others. Since many of the texts are at first obscure, it is helpful to have several individuals bring unique knowledge and skills to the task of translation and interpretation. Each undergraduate editorial assistant has a unique mastery of Haitian Creole and English. Since material is parsed and analyzed by various editorial assistants, over time the collaboration allows for the emergence of an accurate collective transcription and translation. Given their fluency in Haitian Creole and English, the undergraduates provided outstanding transcriptions and translations of Vodou songs and interviews with Vodou practitioners that I could edit and improve upon for the book or <em>The Vodou Archive</em>.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 2','There were many benefits working with these undergraduates. The undergraduates selected to work for this project were balanced bilinguals who demonstrated robust literacy in English and Haitian Creole, which I was able to assess since they had taken my intermediate Haitian Creole course. ','inherit','open','open','','1507-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:59:20','2013-04-18 20:59:20','',1507,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1507-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3914,1,'2013-04-18 20:59:16','2013-04-18 20:59:16','<em>The Vodou Archive</em> is a collaborative partnership spearheaded by the University of Florida and Duke University that seeks to improve the understanding of a central Haitian and Haitian-American spiritual tradition by gathering the audiovisual and textual sources of Vodou communities, interpreting what we collect, expanding the holdings through a self-submission tool, and diffusing the knowledge via an open access digital library.  You can find the current prototype here &lt;<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/vodou\">http://www.dloc.com/vodou</a>&gt;,  hosted within the existing <a href=\"http://dloc.com/\">Digital Library of the Caribbean</a> (dLOC). In addition to the twenty-seven international partners working with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, collaborators from the University of Notre Dame, the University of Miami, the Schrijversvakschool, Florida International University, the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, and City Lore, among others, will contribute elements to <em>The Vodou Archive</em>. This project belongs to a tradition of scholarly work stretching back to the early twentieth century that has sought to counter reductionist and racist visions of the religion through ethnography, analysis of culture and music, and an exploration of the role of Vodou in Haiti’s founding revolution. Such work has long turned to the central texts in Haitian Vodou: its Creole-language songs.\n\nBuilding on my book, <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>,<sup><a href=\"#_ftn1\">[1]</a></sup> <em>The Vodou Archive</em> project makes these songs available in Haitian Creole and English, along with substantial interpretative annotations and essays to contextualize the collection. The edited and curated materials in <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are of major literary, historical, cultural, and religious significance. The vast Vodou corpus stands out because it preserves a wealth of African cultural, ethnological, and historical knowledge.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn2\">[2]</a></sup> The oral and textual corpora of songs are comprised of the authentic and living traditions of the Vodou religion. They are primarily sung in the context of Vodou worship in public and domestic ceremonies, and they constitute the sacred literature of the religion. Vodou songs, a constant in ceremonies, address the mythologies and characteristics of the religion: Bondye (God), the Marasa (the Divine Twins), the lwa (spirits), and the dantan (ancestors), as well as their relations with humans and nature. Vodou songs are time capsules that reveal the history and origins of the Haitian people in Africa, their journey to the Americas in the French slave trade, and their lives in the French colony. Due to their sacred nature, they arewell-preserved records of African and Haitian history and culture.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn3\">[3]</a></sup> Ceremonies and songs preserve African historical (i.e. <em>Bosou, Achade, Legba, Danbala, Simbi, Ayizan</em>), cultural (i.e. <em>lwa, ounsi, ason, oungan, manbo</em>) and geographical (i.e.<em> Rada, Savalou, Boumba</em>) terms in a creolized or blended religious and cultural system.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn4\">[4]</a></sup> Likewise, there are numerous Vodou ceremonies (rites) classified by the African <em>nanchon</em> (nations/communities) where they originate, such as Rada, Petwo, Ginen, Seneka, Ibo, Danwonmen, Nago, Kongo, Kita, etc.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn5\">[5]</a></sup>\n\nUndergraduates played, and will play, a key role in this archive.  They contributed first drafts of transcriptions and translations of Vodou songs and interviews with Vodou practitioners for the book, <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>. The undergraduate students worked on transcribing and translating interviews that I collected from Vodou priests in Haiti and they also transcribed and translated rare pre-existing published materials.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn6\">[6]</a></sup>  The students, Joanne Bartley, Vanessa Brissault, Kat Warwick, Wilmide Vernet, and Musset Apollon, were either paid hourly through grant funding or they earned credit for an independent study. We worked from manuscripts that employ a range of Haitian Creole spelling systems. The official variety, the “IPN,” named after the <em>Institut Pédagogique National</em>, was adopted for the first time in 1980. Many of our manuscripts predate 1980 and thus transcription required heavy correction and consultation with lexicographical works.<sup><a href=\"#_ftn7\">[7]</a></sup> The students had been exposed to the official variety of Haitian Creole spelling in my intermediate Haitian Creole course. After establishing the Haitian Creole source text, the students produced the first draft of the English translation. Then I corrected the Haitian Creole and English drafts in various cycles as the materials moved towards the finished products, either the book or <em>The Vodou Archive</em>.  (See Figure 1, and for the related Vodou Archive digital library, Figures 2 &amp; 3.)<span class=\"caption\" style=\"width: 166px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2358\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px; margin-right: 10px;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig1\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig1-166x250.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 1\" width=\"166\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 1: The book cover of<em> Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>.</span>\n\n<span class=\"caption left\" style=\"margin-right: 20px; width: 266px; clear: none;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig2.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-2359\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig2\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig2-333x208.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 2\" width=\"266\" height=\"166\" /></a> Figure 2: The homepage of the Vodou Archive.</span><span class=\"caption left\" style=\"margin-right: 10px; width: 266px; clear: none;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig3.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-2360\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px; clear: right;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig3\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig3-333x208.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 3\" width=\"266\" height=\"166\" /></a> Figure 3: This screen shot presents the view inside of the Vodou Archive with the filter menu for narrowing results on the left hand side of the screen.</span>\n<div class=\"footnotes\">\n<div id=\"_ftn1\" class=\"footnote\">[1] Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Joanne Bartley, <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English </em> <em>= Chante vodou an kreyòl ayisyen ak angle</em> (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).</div>\n<div id=\"_ftn2\" class=\"footnote\">[2] Max Beauvoir, <em>Le Grand Recueil Sacré ou Répertoire des Chansons du Vodou Haïtien </em>(Port-au-Prince: Edisyon Près Nasyonal d Ayiti, 2008).</div>\n<div id=\"_ftn3\" class=\"footnote\">[3] Claudine Michel, “Vodou in Haiti: Way of Life and Mode of Survival,” in <em>Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers, </em>ed. Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27–37.<em></em></div>\n<div id=\"_ftn4\" class=\"footnote\">[4] See Roger Brand, <em>Cultes vodoun et textes oraux des Wéménou du sud Bénin </em>(Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000); Brand, <em>Ethnographie et vocabulaire religieux des cultes vodoun </em>(Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000); Marc Monsia, <em>Religions indigènes et savoir endogène au Bénin </em>(Cotonou, Benin: Les Éditions du Flamboyant, 2003); Gilbert Rouget, <em>La musique et la transe </em>(Paris: Gallimard, 1991 [1980]); and Gilbert Rouget, <em>Initiatique vôdoun, images du rituel: Chants et danses initiatiques pour le culte des vôdoun au Bénin </em>(Saint-Maur, France: Éditions Sépia, 2001), v.</div>\n<div id=\"_ftn5\" class=\"footnote\">[5] Max G. Beauvoir, <em>Lapriyè Ginen </em>(Port-au-Prince: Edisyon Près Nasyonal d Ayiti. 2008), 109-110.</div>\n<div id=\"_ftn6\" class=\"footnote\">[6] Milo Marcelin, <em>Mythologie Vodou (Rite Arada)</em>,<em> </em>2 vols. (Pétionville: Éditions Canapé Vert, 1950); Laura Boulton, “Laura Boulton’s Songs” (1947), in <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English = Chante vodou an kreyòl ayisyen ak angle</em>, eds. Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Joanne Bartley (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 127-145;  J.L., “J.L. Songs,” in <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>,<em> </em>147-184; Harold Courlander, unpublished manuscript (1939–1940), University of Michigan Special Collections Library; Milo Rigaud, <em>La tradition voudoo et le voudoo haïtien: Son temple, ses mystères, sa magie </em>(Paris: Éditions Niclaus, 1953).</div>\n<div id=\"_ftn7\" class=\"footnote\">[7] Albert Valdman, Iskra Iskrova, Jacques Pierre, and Nicolas André, <em>Haitian Creole-English Bilingual Dictionary</em> (Bloomington, IN: Creole Institute, 2007); Bryant Freeman and Jowel Laguerre, <em>Haitian-English Dictionary</em>, 5th ed. (Lawrence, KS: Institute of Haitian Studies, 2004).</div>\n</div>','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 1','The Vodou Archive is a collaborative partnership spearheaded by the University of Florida and Duke University which seeks to improve the understanding of a central Haitian and Haitian-American spiritual tradition by gathering the audiovisual and textual sources of Vodou communities, interpreting what we collect, expanding the holdings through a self-submission tool, and diffusing the knowledge via an open access digital library.  ','inherit','open','open','','1504-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:59:16','2013-04-18 20:59:16','',1504,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1504-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3915,1,'2013-04-18 20:59:09','2013-04-18 20:59:09','In this issue, five contributors address how hands-on work with archives has been incorporated into undergraduate education.  They each answer a series of five questions to report on what they have done, what worked or not, and what value bringing archives into the classroom, or the classroom into the archive, has.  We invite you to read through the responses by author or by question.','Undergraduates in the Archives','','inherit','open','open','','1500-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:59:09','2013-04-18 20:59:09','',1500,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1500-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3916,1,'2013-04-18 20:42:41','2013-04-18 20:42:41','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery tool for exploring what he calls “the wild and unpredictable intersections of the data that the interface allows us to generate.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1609-10.[/ref] The prospect of having the Archive uncover meaningful relationships between texts is, indeed, an exciting one. As Jonathan Freedman notes, the “ability to link heterogeneous subjects and find once-occulted connections and interconnections makes scholarship invigoratingly fun.”[ref]Jonathan Freedman, “Whitman, Database, Information Culture,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1597.[/ref] As a frequent user of the Whitman Archive, I’ve experienced this “invigorating fun” first-hand, and I look forward to the Archive including more texts by and about Whitman, and incorporating more discovery tools like Brian Pytlik Zillig’s <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/resources/tools/index.html\">TokenX</a>.\n\nAs someone working on digital humanities projects of my own, however, I’m as interested in understanding what it takes to create such tools for discovery as I am the end-user experience of having digital tools make “unpredictable” and “invigorating” discoveries on my behalf. For the remainder of this essay, I’m going to share some thoughts on what has to happen on the back end of a digital project in order to make an otherwise rigorously structured digital artifact feel “wild and unpredictable” to its users. I’ll start with Kenneth M. Price’s description of the necessary labor that goes into structuring data such that it will yield surprising results for end users: \"A database is not an undifferentiated sea of information out of which structure emerges,” Price writes. “Argument is always there from the beginning in how those constructing a database choose to categorize information.\"[ref]Price, “Edition.”[/ref] To an end user who searches a database and finds an interesting juxtaposition between a handful of the hundreds (or thousands) of total documents on that database, it can seem as if those documents have emerged out of “an undifferentiated sea of information.” The reality, however, is far different.\n\nWhen Price alludes to the process that the creators of a database go through as they decide how to “categorize information,” he makes it clear that whenever a user generates a surprising set of juxtapositions between documents it is because someone, somewhere, at some point, has meticulously categorized those documents in such a way that a search engine (or other text analysis tool) will be able to process those documents in a meaningful way. Jerome McGann, who has also commented on the rigorous process of structuring data that is required to create a digital archive, writes that “databases and all digital instruments require the most severe kinds of categorical forms. The power of database—of digital instruments in general—rests in its ability to draw sharp, disambiguated distinctions.”[ref]Jerome McGann, “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1590.[/ref] As both Price and McGann indicate, what can feel like a surprising juxtaposition for the end user has, to a certain extent, already been determined in advance through a time- and labor-intensive process of marking-up, encoding, or otherwise categorizing data.\n\nThis is not to say that those who structure the data for a digital archive have already anticipated every possible search string that users could ever imagine. On the contrary, what interests me as both the user and the creator of digital archives is the effect by which this “sharp, disambiguated” structuring of data can, indeed, produce juxtapositions that archivists could never have predicted. The fundamental preconditions for cultivating such serendipitous discoveries, it seems to me, are a large enough data set and a sufficiently intelligent schema for categorizing that data (not to mention the time, money, software, hardware, human resources, and expertise required to process and categorize the data in the first place).\n\nAllow me to cite an example from outside the realm of digital archiving to illustrate what’s involved in structuring data that yields serendipitous juxtapositions. Pandora Radio is an Internet music service whose goal is to create customized, online radio stations for its users. This customization is based on the work of the Music Genome Project, which has categorized the musical attributes of thousands of different songs. Taking into consideration “everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and . . . singing and vocal harmony,” the Music Genome Project assigns anywhere between 150 and 400 different descriptors to a single song. These descriptors are based on both objective criteria such as the types of instruments used in the song or whether the song is in a major or a minor key, as well as more subjective criteria such as whether or not a song features “Acoustic Sonority,” “Prevalent Use of Groove,” or a “Wet Recording Sound.\"[ref]“The Music Genome Project,” Pandora Radio, accessed December 2, 2010 <a href=\"http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml\">http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml</a>.[/ref] (These descriptors are referred to as musical “genes,” but they could just as easily be called metadata or tags.) Visitors to Pandora Radio type in the name of a song that they like, and then based on the attributes that have been pre-assigned to that song, Pandora will play other songs with similar attributes. The promise of Pandora is that once a database of songs is categorized according to a controlled vocabulary capable of being processed by a computer, listeners will be pleasantly surprised to discover songs that they never knew they already liked. (These songs are, of course, available for purchase so that no serendipitous discovery goes un-capitalized.)\n\nI cite this example within the context of the Whitman Archive not necessarily because Pandora Radio provides a model for digital scholarship of nineteenth-century literature, but because the process of categorizing songs for the Music Genome Project is remarkably similar to the archivist’s effort of structuring data in such a way that it can produce surprising results for the end user. For both Pandora and the Whitman Archive, then, the goal is to reach the tipping point where methodical structuring becomes unexpected discovery, where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and structured data takes on forms that the structure-ers never quite imagined. I like to think that this tipping point where structure yields serendipity is similar to the moment in a fractal pattern where geometry becomes art, the moment where a rigorous, mathematically defined structure takes on an aesthetic quality that was never explicitly intended by the mathematical code that undergirds it, but that is nevertheless absolutely dependent upon that code for its very existence.\n\nMy hope as both the user and creator of digital archives is that we can come to a better understanding of the processes of classification and naming that are involved in these efforts structure data in meaningful ways. Scholars of literature are already comfortable thinking about the power of language to represent—and even create—the world around us. We already have at our disposal a variety of theoretical apparatuses for thinking about the power of language to name and define the world, from the formalism of the New Critics to the semiotics of the Post-Structuralists and even the focus on the materiality of language in Book History scholarship. What we need to add to this list of theories and methodologies is a more sophisticated understanding of taxonomy and categorization. This will not only require an interdisciplinary rendezvous with librarians and scholars of information architecture, but it will also demand that we do the cultural history of such seemingly mundane phenomena as filing cabinets and accounting ledgers. Compared to the work being done by digital humanities scholars in the areas of data visualization, text mining, social networking, and geo-spatial analysis, studying the history of cataloging, sorting, and organizing seems to be the intellectual equivalent of a trip to Target to buy hard-plastic storage bins when you’d rather be at the Apple Store picking up an iPad. Nevertheless, everything that we want digital technology to do to help us better understand literary texts depends upon our ability to properly name, sort, and categorize the information that we put into a computer. We do ourselves a disservice to ignore or even minimize this crucial stage of the process.\n\nOne of the most frequently quoted statements about the future of digital scholarship in the humanities comes from Jerome McGann, who wrote that “the digital technology used by humanities scholars has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and disseminating large bodies of materials. In this respect the work has not engaged the central questions and concerns of the [humanities, which is] . . . . the exploration and explanation of aesthetic works.”[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web</em> (New York: Palgrave, 2001), xi-xii.[/ref] I don’t want to make a straw-man out of McGann’s powerful insight, but I can’t help but take issue with his claim that the “sorting” of texts will not aid us in our goal of using digital technology to explore and explain aesthetic works. Before a digital tool of any kind can work with a text in any way, the elements of that text must be sorted, classified, and categorized according to a schema that the computer will understand. This is not to say that scholars in the digital humanities should put aside their text visualization projects and their geo-spatial analyses in order to do the Dewey Decimal system one better, but rather that the foundational tasks of organizing and classifying should more completely theorized and more intimately woven into the fabric of digital scholarship.\n\nBy attending to the tedium of taxonomy we may begin to feel like nineteenth-century scriveners rather than twenty-first century techies. Like those scriveners of old, we may prefer not to spend our time with such mundane things. Nevertheless, if we wish to generate the kinds of “wild and unpredictable intersections of . . . data” that “makes scholarship invigoratingly fun” we should embrace what actually promises to be a fascinating conversation about the history of taxonomy, structure, classification, and form. This conversation will take us through the Library of Alexandria, the Great Chain of Being, medieval bestiaries, Wunderkammer, the Mundaneum, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, cryptography, tarot cards, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Every time we tag, code, or classify a text for a digital archive, we are participating in the long history of human classification systems. The better able we are to understand that history and to situate ourselves within it, the better understanding we will have of our digital archives and what they can do.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  4','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery to...','inherit','open','open','','144-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:42:41','2013-04-18 20:42:41','',144,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/144-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3917,1,'2013-04-18 20:42:46','2013-04-18 20:42:46','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors. In such an environment, Folsom writes, “All users are potential co-editors.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Projecting Whitman: The Evolution and Remediation of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00003.html.[/ref] I love the notion that everyone is a “potential co-editor” of the Whitman Archive, and I\'d like to consider how the Archive could make better use of its digital form as a way to more fully realize this potential. I would never advocate for crowd-sourcing the Archive on the model of sites like Wikipedia, but I would like the Archive directors to take more seriously the implication that “All users are potential co-editors.”\n\nI have a tremendous amount of respect for how the Archive directors have responded to public criticisms from other scholars. In a 2007 <em>PMLA</em> forum on the Whitman Archive, for example, Meredith McGill took the Archive to task for decontextualizing the poems that Whitman had published in newspapers and magazines by clipping the poems from their original sources and excluding all the other articles, poems, and advertisements that appeared alongside Whitman’s poems.[ref]Meredith L. McGill, “Remediating Whitman,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007):1594.[/ref] The Archive promptly responded to this criticism by including the entire page of the periodical where a Whitman poem appeared. But not every user of the Whitman Archive can get the attention of the Archive directors in the pages of <em>PMLA</em>. And even those fortunate enough to do so don\'t have a mechanism for providing additional feedback to the Archive directors regarding their response to suggestions for improvement. I wonder, does McGill think it was sufficient to include the complete newspaper page where a Whitman poem appeared, or would she rather that the Archive include the rest of the issue is well? Or would she even prefer a link to some external site that hosts the entire run of the paper?\n\nThe Archive could make better use of its digital form by providing “user accounts or other community-hosting capabilities,” as Matt Cohen has recently suggested.[ref]Cohen, “Design and Politics,” 241.[/ref]Integrating Web 2.0 components such as user accounts and a comment section to the Whitman Archive would have considerable implications for the Archive: while a comments section would give scholars such as McGill a much more dynamic venue for engaging with the Archive\'s directors, it would also make the Archive feel less like a scholarly edition of Whitman\'s works and more like a Facebook fan page. Nevertheless, Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has already said that “scholarly edition” doesn\'t necessarily describe what the Whitman Archive actually is. Instead, Price has characterized the Archive as something more like a workshop, or, as he puts it, a “group of people who are now joined together for a common purpose.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price, \"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?\" <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html.[/ref] If that group of people could also include the hundreds (if not thousands) of scholars, students, and non-academic readers who visit the Archive every day, it would not only make better use of the digital medium, but it would also go some distance toward fulfilling Folsom\'s claim that “All users are potential co-editors.”','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  3','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors.','inherit','open','open','','142-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:42:46','2013-04-18 20:42:46','',142,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/142-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3918,1,'2013-04-18 20:43:42','2013-04-18 20:43:42','I would like to see the Whitman Archive make more transparent the choices that go into deciding how texts are marked-up and encoded. Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has written that the “ongoing decision-making” regarding the mark-up of texts on the Archive is “interpretive rather than mechanical,” and that this interpretive coding “adds intelligence to an electronic text . . . mak[ing] it robust and illuminating as a tool for analysis.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price,\"\'Debris,\' Creative Scatter, and the Challenges of Editing Whitman,\" in <em>Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present</em>, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 67.[/ref] I admire Price’s forthright admission that marking-up a text for the digital medium is not merely a change in format, but an act of interpretation. As someone who visits the Whitman Archive on a regular basis, I’d like to have a clearer sense of what kinds of decisions—and, therefore, interpretations—are being made as texts are digitally encoded, and, specifically, what those decisions reveal about the textual condition of Whitman’s works.\n\nThis request is not based in a suspicion of any kind that the Archive directors are placing a biased interpretation onto Whitman’s poetry as they encode it for presentation on the Archive; rather, my request is based in a desire to following along on the process of discovery that Matt Cohen describes as an integral part of digital encoding: “As a student in the 1990s, doing transcription and basic encoding of Whitman documents, I learned a lot about textual structures that I had not encountered in seminars; when discussing these observations with the project directors, sometimes new areas of concern or future development would emerge.”[ref]Matt Cohen, “Design and Politics in Electronic American Literary Archives,” in <em>The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age</em>, ed. Amy Earhart and Andrew Jewell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 233.[/ref] The Archive is already a valuable resource for gaining access to Whitman’s works; it can also be a resource for learning about how Whitman constructed his texts in manuscript and in print by eavesdropping on the process by which these texts are reconstructed for the digital medium.\n\nDirectors and editors at the Archive have already begun to provide the kind of running commentary on the encoding process that I would like to see more of. Brett Barney, the Senior Associate Editor of the Archive, has written an insightful essay about his encoding the 1867 edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> that is available on the Archive, and both Price and Folsom have published, in a number of different venues, provocative essays that detail the lessons about textuality that they have learned from preparing texts for the Archive.[ref]Brett Barney, \"‘Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle: Reflections after Tagging the 1867 Leaves of Grass,” <em>The <em>Walt Whitman Archive, </em></em><em>accessed December 2, 2010 </em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html</a>. Additional essay by Folsom and Price are also available at http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/index.html.[/ref] Currently, the Whitman Archive makes available the TEI-encoded XML source files for the major texts on the Archive as well as the Archive’s encoding guidelines and related DTD files. As much as I value this peek into the inner workings of the Archive, the process by which these XML files are created—the “ongoing decision-making” Price refers to—is as important as the product itself. The Archive could benefit from more self-reflexive commentaries on the encoding process, perhaps using Barney’s essay as a model. The recently added <a href=\"http://wwa-changelog.blogspot.com/\">WWA-Changelog</a>—a blog connected to the Archive that details the changes that editors make to files once they are posted online—could provide a model for how such commentaries could be more fully integrated into the experience of working with the Archive.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley 2','I would like to see the Whitman Archive make more transparent the choices that go into deciding how texts are marked-up and encoded. Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has written that the “ongoing decision-making” regarding the mark-up of texts on the Archive is “interpretive rather than mechanical,” and that this interpretive coding...','inherit','open','open','','140-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:43:42','2013-04-18 20:43:42','',140,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/140-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3919,1,'2013-04-18 20:43:48','2013-04-18 20:43:48','From my perspective as a scholar, the greatest strength of the Whitman Archive is that it provides free and open access to the essential texts for studying the life and work of Walt Whitman. I’ve consulted the Whitman Archive every time I’ve ever written about Whitman, whether it’s to check the precise wording of a text, to follow the life cycle of a poem as it moves from manuscript to print and on through the various editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, to identify the location of a primary document in a brick-and-mortar archive, to read nineteenth-century reviews of Whitman’s writing, or to search the Archive’s exhaustive database of Whitman scholarship. Using the Whitman Archive is like having immediate access to shelves and shelves worth of valuable (and often expensive) books.\n\nWhen I was a graduate student I burned through a toner cartridge printing out page images of the antebellum editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> from the Whitman Archive. The poems in these early editions went through radical revisions from one edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> to the next, and I really needed to get to know these poems in order to make the argument I was making in my dissertation about Whitman’s antebellum period. Being able to access these poems in various states gave me a much better sense of Whitman’s pre-Civil War career than the variorum of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>—with its decontextualized snippets from the antebellum editions—was able to give me.\n\nI’ve also recently learned that the Whitman Archive is more than just a repository of raw materials that scholars can mine for the resources we need to tell our stories about Whitman’s life and work; rather, the Archive is a storyteller in its own right. Here’s an example: <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden,</em> the multi-volume collection of Whitman’s conversations with his friend Horace Trauble, was not yet available on the Archive when I was writing an essay a few years ago about Elizabeth Porter Gould, the editor of a gift-book edition of Whitman’s poems called <em>Gems from Walt Whitman</em> (1889). Without the benefit of a searchable, digital edition of <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em> I had to find references to Gould the old-fashioned way: cribbing from Ed Folsom’s footnotes—and, of course, slogging through the poorly indexed volumes themselves. Since I published the essay, however, I’ve had the opportunity to search for Gould in the Archive’s edition of <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, and the effect of having the Archive’s search engine generate a list of these references had a remarkable impact on me. The essay that I had written demanded a certain amount of focus in order to make the argument about gender and authorship that I wanted to make, and I was always left with a touch of regret that I never had the chance to unfold the fascinating relationship between Whitman and Gould as fully as I would have liked. Opening up different tabs in my browser to read each of these references on the Whitman Archive, however, allowed me to track the progress of their relationship as they negotiated their competing goals for what <em>Gems from Walt Whitman </em>should be. I’m proud of the story that I was able to tell about Whitman and Gould, but I’m also glad to know that the Whitman Archive can tell that story another way.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Whitley  1','From my perspective as a scholar, the greatest strength of the Whitman Archive is that it provides free and open access to the essential texts for studying the life and work of Walt Whitman. I’ve consulted the Whitman Archive every time I’ve ever written about Whitman, whether it’s to check the precise wording of a text, to follow the life cycle of a poem...','inherit','open','open','','138-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:43:48','2013-04-18 20:43:48','',138,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/138-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3920,1,'2013-04-18 20:43:53','2013-04-18 20:43:53','In the Digital Humanist’s tool belt, the database is the trusty stand-by. Robust and indispensable, it has become a basic tool of modern academic research. One of the primary endeavors of the Digital Humanities, however, is to re-focus the perspective on the tools we use, and perhaps to redefine the term “tool” in the process. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing … with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something.”[ref]<em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed., s.v. “Tool.”[/ref] This definition points plainly toward outcome, the tool’s utility at accomplishing “some operation,” as if it were an extension of the user’s will as a wrench is an extension of his or her hand. But by emphasizing results only, the dictionary neglects a tool’s significant influence over process.\n\nTools define process as much as they do outcome. When one searches a database, its individual design mediates the experience, filters it, frames it. A sleek database makes the act of use nearly imperceptible—it stays out of the way, as it were, by anticipating the needs and intuitions of the general user in its design. However, the specific user will always be limited by these presuppositions. It is tempting to imagine a database as a neutral container, a kind of Tupperware 2.0, while in fact the tool guides the searches that one can make, the items that they will return, and which will appear prominent. Facets of the design guide what sorts of orderings of information, or narratives, the researcher will construct out of the raw data, such that the database itself can form a subtle argument or narrative claim.\n\nAcknowledging the skewed nature of any tool that presents information, <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> co-editor Ed Folsom describes his approach to structuring the database: “Initially, [co-editor Kenneth] Price and I had ideas of how we would control the material in the database, and we knew the narratives we wanted to tell, the frames we wanted to construct. But the details of the database quickly exceeded any narrative we might try to frame the data with. Little roots shot out everywhere and attached to particulars we could not have imagined. Only if we insulated the narrative from the database could the narrative persist.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: the Epic Transformation of Archives,”<em> The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed November 2010,<em> </em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html</a>.[/ref] To me, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is rife with narrative paths for the user. Some of these are micro-narratives, unavoidably emerging from details of the interface. Because the left-hand navigation menu is more visually prominent than the search bar, the user is more strongly guided into a browsing mode of exploration, which encourages him or her to consider Whitman through a compartmentalized view of his life and works. By featuring a simple search bar without advanced specifications or filtration[ref]A notice on the site informs the user that this feature is soon slated to undergo an enhancement, which will include the development of faceted search capabilities.[/ref], the database allows the user to cast a virtual fishing line for an assortment of items but makes it more difficult to conduct a narrowly directed search—thus, one is likely to encounter information that seems scattered rather than tight and contextual.\n\nApart from these micro-narratives, the database also cradles a deep narrative claim pertaining to Whitman’s corpus: throughout the database there is an open discussion examining the suggestive congruity between Whitman’s work and the digital medium in which it is takes form. The documentation of this resonance begins with observations about Whitman’s language and works, which seem to share characteristics of digital structure. For example, Ed Folsom to the organic networks present in Whitman’s language, an intertextual and burgeoning web of words. He compares this quality to the dense entanglement of leaves and roots that adorn the lettering on the first edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, recalling the rhizome[ref]Defined as “an elongated, usually horizontal, subterranean stem which sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its length.” <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 3rd ed., s.v. \"Rhizome.\"[/ref]—“that subterranean stem that grows every which way and represents the nomadic multiplicity of identity—no central root but an intertwined web of roots.”[ref]Folsom, “Database as Genre.<em>”</em>[/ref] Databases, too, are rhizomorphous, he argues—and this accordance between Whitman’s work and its digital format allows the two to reflect through and off of one another, revealing new permutations of form and language.\n\nIn a proleptic twist, Whitman’s work predates its own ideal medium. A common observation in the various articles about the database is the fact that the work is perhaps better displayed in digital form that it ever was in print: the digital medium is better equipped to represent the shapes and forms of the Whitman corpus, and flexible enough to accommodate the complex relationship between the many iterations of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>. The database does not privilege one edition over any other, and treats them as autonomous but entwined works rather than pieces of a distinct whole or drafts leading up to a definitive version. The sheer multiplicity of his writing is betrayed by the rigidity of print mediums. “Whitman’s work was always being revised, was always in flux, and fixed forms of print do not adequately capture his incessant revisions,” argues Price.[ref]Kenneth M. Price, “About the <em>Archive</em>: History,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed November 2010, http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html.[/ref] Whitman himself advocated methods of reading and taking meaning from his texts that today seem almost designed for digital tools. A line from <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, first appearing in the 1881-82 edition, reads “the words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing.”[ref]Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, (Washington, D.C, 1881-82), http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1871/whole.html.[/ref] Taking long-view of literature, Whitman’s remark resonates with the current practice of distant reading, in which vast quantities of text can be analyzed as an entity using statistical information and visualizations. Predating this practice, Whitman draws the reader away from the individual minutiae of his poetry and towards impressionistic views. If any text was written for a database, this one was.\n\nThus, the <em>Archive</em> attempts not only to exhibit its contents, but to carry out a vision that Whitman may have offered in the original work. This narrative is present throughout the site primarily via the apparent compatibility between the content and form. The claim is so elegant, so fluid and simple, that the argument almost makes itself.\n\nThe <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is able to transcend its (considerable) utility as a research tool, performing simultaneously as a critical analysis, a new edition of Whitman, and independent artistic work. I imagine four theoretical levels at which a format can manage a text, with increasing involvement: presentation, description, criticism, and artistic response. The sophistication of this particular database is in how it blurs the lines between those acts, seeming to realize all at once and none predominantly, and, further, how it reveals the fact that this multiplicity of function must be true of all databases, however subtly, however unintentionally.\n\nThis remarkable plurality within a single tool (if tool is still an adequate term) is both fitting, in the context of Whitman, and disruptive to the user’s relationship with the technology. It remains to be addressed how, or whether, the user should adjust his or her approach to such a complex mechanism. At the recent undergraduate digital humanities symposium Re: Humanities, keynote speaker Amanda French advocated for the “rehumaniz[ation of] the inhuman mass of data.”[ref]Amanda French, “Humanities Research Methods from 1860 to 2060” (presentation at Re:Humanities, Haverford, PA, November 11-12, 2010).[/ref] She suggests that scholars who favor distant reading may be losing track of a meaningful element of the text. Rather than conducting interpretive based on massive aggregates of information, why not reacquaint ourselves with an affection for individual pieces of data, find “datum love” among the mass of details? The two methods appear to be mutually exclusive. However, by reconceiving the practice of data mining, it is arguably possible to find personal touches in the thrill of broad claims as well as the nuance of the particular.\n\nIf each database frames its contents in an array of narrative claims, then each one is specific, disputable, and limited. Rather than markers of failure, however, we might use these idiosyncracies to reawaken us to the particular experience that that tool offers. We could use the fact that a database mediates actively to inject an element of personal interaction into the task of digital research. In the course of achieving proficiency with any tool, one gains an understanding of its particular advantages and limitations through repeated contact and experimentation, returning to the interactive original meaning of “interface.”[ref]Defined as “a means or place of interaction between two systems, organizations, etc.; a meeting-point or common ground between two parties, systems, or disciplines; also, interaction, liaison, dialogue.” <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 2nd ed., s.v. \"Interface.\"[/ref] Here is an opportunity to find a better alternative to the impersonal database experience, an escape from hard vocabulary statistics untempered by readerly love.\n\nThe management of scale is a challenge that each database must address by determining how the user will navigate between detail and distance. Due to Whitman’s distinctive engagement with matters of scale, especially the fluidity between the individual and the masses, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> may be uniquely able to offer a distant reading that is paradoxically intimate in its connection to the philosophy of the poet. How can a distant reading cheat the humanist if it scrutinizes the work of the man who wrote, exhilarated, “Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses?”[ref]Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass: 150<sup>th</sup> Anniversary Edition</em>, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), iii.[/ref] Ed Folsom describes Whitman’s “poetic project” as an endeavor “to move from a particular person, period, or place toward an absorptive embrace of all people, periods, and places,”[ref]Folsom, “Database as Genre.”[/ref]emphasizing the blurred distinctions between love of the particular and love of the vast. TokenX, a textual analysis tool that is available through the database, numerically charts the uses of particular words throughout the six editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, giving a visual representation to the exponential growth and organic proliferation of certain words as the poetry burgeoned in its various iterations. Statistical tools such as these, when applied to the work of this particular author, are not reductive but in fact profoundly resonant with the tone and principles of the poetry they describe. Perhaps this is the database to wed tender devotion to individual data and multiplicity.\n\nFeatured prominently on the home page of the <em>Archive</em> is a striking engraving of Whitman’s face.[ref]William J. Linton, (1870-72), engraving, (http://whitmanarchive.org/multimedia/image044.html?sort=year&amp;order=ascending&amp;page=5).[/ref] The poet appears as if caught in motion, whipping past the viewer with his eddies of hair scattered about his face like sprouts. The beard connotes a general outward drift as it spreads from his face in swells and waves. And then, from somewhere in the profusion of hair and wrinkles emerges an arresting pair of dark eyes: Whitman’s eyes simultaneously confront and confide in the viewer, imparting a personal moment amidst a storm of minutiae.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 4','In the Digital Humanist’s tool belt, the database is the trusty stand-by. Robust and indispensable, it has become a basic tool of modern academic research. One of the primary endeavors of the Digital Humanities, however, is to re-focus the perspective on the tools we use, and perhaps to redefine the term “tool” in the process. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing … with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something.\"','inherit','open','open','','136-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:43:53','2013-04-18 20:43:53','',136,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/136-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3921,1,'2013-04-18 20:43:58','2013-04-18 20:43:58','As the <em>Archive</em> is very aware, the Whitman corpus presents a particular set of linguistic challenges to the reader that seem to appeal for a more open and flexible form than what is offered by their original editions of print. Digital forms often work well for such challenging texts because they provide a-linear approaches of exploration and analysis, but in my opinion the <em>Archive </em>has not yet developed into a format that takes full advantage of this possibility. Though I was able to navigate around the site easily from any point with the aid of the menu across the top of the page and the breadcrumb links, my general experience of the Whitman archive was that it remains limited by linear arrangements of data. The structure of the database, which is dominated by a hierarchical folder system, can make it difficult to stir up new configurations of information: the volume of the repository is still impressive, but in this case a physical archive might allow better non-linear entry.\n\nAnd yet, the hierarchical folders and the linear browsing process they suggest also garnered my praised in an earlier question, due to their “clean” and “intuitive” qualities. While limiting to the agile Whitman scholar, these features are very advantageous in one’s initial foray into the <em>Archive</em> because they present easier options and clear delineations.\n\nPhysical archives fit well into folder systems while maintaining an element of the random and a-linear because each page is a potential entry-point. Web pages, however, favor top-view and selection rather than the act of flipping through or diving in at a random point. The <em>Walt Whitman Archive </em>has moved past the limitations of print in many ways already; if there was a way to reincorporate some of the random browsability of the physical archive, without sacrificing the intuitive appearance, the experience might benefit. This might be accomplished by exposing more metadata on the surface of the site in order to cut new cross-sections through the repository; for example, making it possible to browse by year rather than type and title of work, or organizing clusters of data by theme or biographical reference. If the editors can find a way to take the information out of its silos across the site, their users might enjoy an even more fluid and organic approach to the text.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 3','As the Archive is very aware, the Whitman corpus presents a particular set of linguistic challenges to the reader that seem to appeal for a more open and flexible form than what is offered by their original editions of print. Digital forms often work well for such challenging texts because they provide a-linear approaches of exploration and analysis, but in my opinion the Archive has not yet developed...','inherit','open','open','','134-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:43:58','2013-04-18 20:43:58','',134,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/134-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3922,1,'2013-04-18 20:53:45','2013-04-18 20:53:45','While I found the basic navigability of the site to be well-designed, I wish that it was easier to discover new things in the database. The obvious place to begin would be the search tool, which is very limited. While more robust features are promised for the future (according to a notice at the top of the page), the current tool falls short of expectations for a database of this size and quality. Discovery of new material depends upon the possibility of encountering random bits of data and the ability to arrange information in new permutations such that new synchronies arise; currently, the <em>Archive </em>is not well configured for such active contact between the reader and the raw data. In addition to random data, an improved search tool would also better allow the user to conduct specific paths of inquiry. For a hypothetical student with an assignment to follow, it can be important to view thematic cross sections rather than vertical stacks of data under folders.\n\nThe addition of tagging would help to increase the fluidity of the site. In order to maintain the rigor of its editorship, the <em>Archive</em> might prefer to use tags that are curated by a team rather than a ‘folksonomy’ approach that opens up tag authorship to all users and lets the system grow on its own, minimally governed. The functionality of the search tool might improve, also, by responding to terms that have demonstrated relevance to users rather than random syntax in content.\n\nNavigation between pages on the <em>Archive </em>is smooth and intuitive; however, it could benefit form the implementation of same-page navigation tools. Many of the pages on the site feature very long texts, which require excessive scrolling and are difficult to read in a non-linear fashion. A hyperlinked table of contents at the top might be a first step, but many of the long critical articles do not have obvious breaking points and would not divide naturally into a table. Eventually, it would be good to see a more sophisticated tool for navigating through content on the same page—as it is, a database that deliberately embraces the fluidity of digital forms traps the reader in a format that is ironically dependent upon rigid sequence and imitated print forms. Reducing this rigidity would greatly improve the user experience.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 2','While I found the basic navigability of the site to be well-designed, I wish that it was easier to discover new things in the database. The obvious place to begin would be the search tool, which is very limited. While more robust features are promised for the future (according to a notice at the top of the page), the current tool falls short of expectations for a database of this size and quality.','inherit','open','open','','132-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:53:45','2013-04-18 20:53:45','',132,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/132-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3923,1,'2013-04-18 20:53:49','2013-04-18 20:53:49','Though the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> seems well designed for researchers at all levels of expertise, it strikes me as particularly well-suited for students or for others who may enter the site with limited knowledge about the author and his works. A significant advantage is the clean and inviting appearance of the layout at all levels of the database. The interface is wonderfully uncluttered, making exploration simple and unintimidating. On the homepage left-hand navigation menu, I found the categories to be intuitive and well-organized. I clarified this assessment with an experiment, in which I browsed manually for items that I already knew existed in the archive. In all cases, I was able to locate the target items with little or no backtracking.\n\nI found the most valuable feature of the site for the non-expert visitor to be the contextual information that was present on many of the pages in the database. For example, when clicking on any of the major links under the “published works” tab, I was given a short blurb that generally included a preface to the contents of the page, its status of development and coming additions, and any important contextual knowledge that would help me situate it in culture or among Whitman’s other works. It was also extremely helpful to find each of Whitman’s published books (excluding the foreign editions) furnished with a detailed and thoughtful “About” page, which provided enough background and compelling analysis to give me, the student and non-expert, a firm grasp of the material I was about to browse.\n\nI would feel confident and comfortable investigating a specific topic, browsing for research material, or exploring new content out of curiosity on the <em>Archive</em>. More than a repository, it is well-developed as a learning tool for those who are new to Whitman scholarship.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 1','Though the Walt Whitman Archive seems well designed for researchers at all levels of expertise, it strikes me as particularly well-suited for students or for others who may enter the site with limited knowledge about the author and his works. A significant advantage is the clean and inviting appearance of the layout at all levels of the database. The interface is wonderfully uncluttered, making exploration simple and unintimidating.','inherit','open','open','','130-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:53:49','2013-04-18 20:53:49','',130,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/130-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3924,1,'2013-04-18 20:53:53','2013-04-18 20:53:53','In the following section I would like to reflect on some questions about the nature of digital resources, humanities scholarship and the uses to which such material may be put. One of these is the still-contentious issue of whether the creation of such resources is regarded as scholarship in itself or as a way of facilitating the work of other scholars. Even the most recent studies indicate that opinions still remain sharply divided about whether the creation of digital resources such as the Whitman archive is considered to be scholarship and worthy of being rewarded us such by promotion, tenure or in the UK Research Assessment Exercise.[ref]D. Harley, S.K. Acord, S. Earl-Novell, S. Lawrence, and C.J. King, “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines” (UC Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2010).[/ref] There is an understandable tendency in digital humanities to regard this as an outrageous undervaluation of what we do, and to wish to advocate for our work to be better understood. Yet if we can resist this temptation, the question at issue is an important one. The argument against granting digital resources scholarly status equivalent to a journal article, monograph or critical edition must surely be that such resources are performing a service, akin to that provided by an archive or library in the analogue world: that of bringing together useful materials for other scholars to use.\n\nIt has long been the case that as Melissa Terras has argued so eloquently, in order for our digital work to be valued we must publish in traditional media.[ref]M. Terras, “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon Digital Humanities” (plenary presented at Digital Humanities 2010 Conference, Kings College London, 2010). http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2010/07/dh2010-plenary-present-not-voting.html[/ref] However, this is about to change, at least for some of us. In the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework in the UK, digital resources will be assessed in all subject areas as a comparable output to print. This is a vitally important change, carrying with it the implication of a re-evaluation of the scholarly value of the digital; but it places ever more emphasis on the need for us to consider in a rational, not evangelistic, fashion what may distinguish a digital scholarly work from that which renders a service.\n\nIn this context, nomenclature is not a useful guide. The Whitman project’s creators chose to call their creation an archive, perhaps because like the Rosetti Archive or Valley of the Shadow it contains a collection of various different types of material. However, McGann himself describes Rosetti as a digital edition.[ref]Jerome McGann, “Electronic Archives and Critical Editing,” <em>Literature Compass</em> 7:10 (2010): 37-42.[/ref] While I do not mean to imply that creating and curating an archive in the analogue world is not an intellectual exercise, it is not in itself something for which scholars gain credit. Thus the metaphor would hold that if scholarship done as the result of the use or creation of a physical archive as opposed to in its curation is recognised, then it should be similar in the digital sphere. But is this really appropriate, and does the name ‘archive’ under value the complex nature of what is being achieved in digital resources such as this? Conversely, why is it then that creating a critical edition, whether print or digital form is considered to be a scholarly activity worthy of credit in its own right?\n\nIt may be because in the print world editors are called upon to make selections and decisions about the best possible copy text, and which textual variants to include. Yet as Gabler argues, as digital technology progresses, digital editions increasingly try to make as many different texts and variants available to readers as possible, to the point that while we may choose to read a literary text in print, the digital medium is most appropriate for complex comparison and study of variants.[ref]H. W. Gabler “Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition,” <em>Literature Compass</em> 7:10 (2010): 43–56.[/ref] The theory of social editions also suggests that the literary text should be presented with reference to its broader social and intellectual milieu.[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and D. F. McKenzie, <em>Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts</em>(London: The British Library, 1986).[/ref]\n\nThe Whitman archive provides page images and transcriptions of all six printed editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, as well as manuscript material and newspaper copy. It calls itself an archive, yet could as easily be considered an excellent example of the digital social edition, where users are encouraged to become part of the scholarly process by comparing transcribed manuscripts with the page images or making judgements about which version of a given poem to use. So this is this, an edition (scholarly product) or an archive (service for others)? I would argue that this distinction is no longer meaningful in the digital sphere where boundaries between what we consider to be editions and archives have become blurred.\n\nEven if we assert that this is a resource for others to use, that could as easily describe a scholarly edition. It is also arguable that the value of such a resource as a scholarly product in its own right is in the choices made about what types of different materials should be brought together, and how contextual material about Whitman’s life, work and even disciples should be presented. Once again, these are just the kind of decisions that editors of scholarly editions also make. As all digital humanists are aware, the act of marking up text is in itself one of scholarly interpretation, which is why it is so vital that the full marked up texts are presented here. This, like the decision to present page images alongside transcription is an act of intellectual openness: it allows other scholars to understand, and if necessary question the decisions that have been made in their presentation. Far from being a sub-scholarly process, digital resources such as Whitman achieve a lustration of the decision making processes that are the silent underpinning of the task of editors or literary scholars in general. In this sense, digital humanities is ahead of many other fields. Science is only beginning to discover the potential of using digital technologies to link experimental data to articles written as a result of its analysis, so that other scholars may use such data to replicate the experiments that are reported on.[ref]C. Bizer, T. Heath, and T. Berners-Lee, “Linked Data - The Story So Far,” <em>International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems</em> (IJSWIS), Special Issue on Linked Data, ed. T. Heath, M. Hepp, and C. Bizer, (forthcoming). http://linkeddata.org/docs/ijswis-special-issue[/ref] Yet resources such as the Whitman archive have been providing this kind of functionality for some time. Texts are the primary data of literary scholars after all.\n\nThere is, it appears, a good case to be made for the scholarly robustness of digital resources, even those which modestly refer to themselves as an archive. The other question we must address, however, in making the case for our discipline is not just whether such resources constitute scholarly activity, but what kind of new types of research they make possible which would not have been achievable in an analogue world. This is surely the main criterion by which digital humanities must be judged. At present this is much less clear.\n\nWe know that the digital medium presents many new possibilities for editors and resource creators themselves, but we still know too little about whether research and scholarship themselves are changing as a result of their use. Vanhoutte, for example, has argued that most users simply require a reading text despite the fact that digital resources make a deeper kind of scholarly engagement possible.[ref]E. Vanhoutte, “Every Reader His Own Bibliographer – An Absurdity?” in <em>Text Editing, Print and the Digital World</em>, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (London: Ashgate, 2002): 99-112.[/ref] Even the most recent study of humanities users of digital resources[ref]C. Madsen, “Communities, Innovation, and Critical Mass: Understanding the Impact of Digitization on Scholarship in the Humanities through the Case of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies” (PhD diss, Oxford University, 2010): Chapters 6-7.[/ref] suggests they still make relatively simple uses of digital resources, which they value as a way to access greater amounts of primary texts without the need to travel, to search them faster, and ultimately, overwhelmingly, to read them. Digital humanists may be using computational analysis or visualisation techniques on huge data sets, (for example Dan Cohen’s recent studies of Google Books[ref]Patricia Cohen, “Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers,” <em>New York Times</em>, December 3, 2010, <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all\">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all</a>[/ref]) but it appears that resources such as the Whitman archive may be more transformative of scholarship from the point of view of their creators than of most of their users. Digital Humanities has have moved on from writing evangelising articles and prescribing more training to writing use cases that, arguably, only the converted digital humanists ever read (for example a recent paper on the Monk project[ref]C. Plaisant, T. Clement, R. Vuillemot, S. Steger, and K. Uszkalo, “Use Cases Driving the Tool Development in the MONK project” (paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, University of Maryland, USA, June 22-25, 2009).[/ref]) Yet the results appear the same, such excellent resources as Whitman may find that only a few expert users make best use of the potential of what they are being offered.\n\nThis may seem rather a depressing vision, but social networking theory may offer a more positive interpretation of this. We know that in most online communities only 10% of the participants post, the others may read, enjoy, but not take part.[ref]B. Nonnecke and J. Preece, “Lurker Demographics: Counting the Silent” in <em>Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems</em> (Proceedings of the SIGCHI, 2000): 73-80. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=332040.332409&amp;type=series [/ref] It is also an often repeated law of software development that 80% of users make use of 20% of a given application’s features. Thus if we apply such metrics to digital humanities it seems perverse that we somehow feel we have failed unless all users are making the most extensive use of every last piece of potential a resource has to offer. This is why it is important that, as I argued above, digital resources should be accessible for the interested amateur as well as the academic expert and why we should not be disappointed if most people search for quotations for their college assignments or print out poems to use to teach a class, or to read when writing an article. Digital resources have different types of user, and to expect them all to be expert is a kind of techie arrogance of the worst kind.\n\nSocial networking is also relevant in another context when consider digital resources. The possibilities of a very different kind of social edition are only beginning to be explored by projects such as UCL’s own Transcribe Bentham project. Yet the popularity of crowd sourcing has been proven in science, and we know that users will support, explore and exploit more fully resources that they help to create.[ref]Claire Warwick, M. Terras and C. Fisher, “iTrench: A Study of User Reactions to the Use of IT in Field Archaeology” (paper presented at Digital Humanities 2008 conference, University of Oulu, Finland, June 25-29 2008).[/ref] Thus it may be that an alternative way of involving users in digital humanities is not only to consult them about what they would like to do, design resources so that they can do it as well as possible, or suggest ways in which a resources might be used, but also to encourage them to take part in their creation.\n\nIt can be seen therefore that the metaphysics wrought by the digital transformations inherent in the Whitman archives take us well beyond the limitations of books. We can appreciate the new potential inherent in digital production for the scholars who produce such resources, but further work remains to be done on exactly how such editions or archives may transform the lives of their users. Part of this work will be undertaken in the coming year by researchers from the INKE project, when we will consider digital scholarly editions. However, in a more general sense it will be fascinating to see whether and how far any kind of crowd sourced content may be integrated into serious scholarly resources such as Whitman. Until that experiment is tried in earnest, we are still some way from utilising the potential of the truly social edition.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 4','In the following section I would like to reflect on some questions about the nature of digital resources, humanities scholarship and the uses to which such material may be put. One of these is the still-contentious issue of whether the creation of such resources is regarded as scholarship in itself or as a way of facilitating the work of other scholars. Even the most recent studies indicate that opinions still remain sharply divided...','inherit','open','open','','127-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:53:53','2013-04-18 20:53:53','',127,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/127-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3925,1,'2013-04-18 20:53:57','2013-04-18 20:53:57','It is difficult for me to answer the final question because most of the scholarly material that I need are now available in digital form. As a digital humanist, rather than a literary scholar I have very little need to use original manuscripts or early printed books in my own work. What we know about the research practices of humanity scholars, however, suggests that this resource is extremely well designed for their needs. It does not assume that the digital will replace the need to use physical books and indeed it makes this easier by the inclusion of complex bibliographic data especially about Whitman\'s manuscripts and their whereabouts. It also follows good practice in digital resource creation in that it provides scanned page images of the books and manuscripts thus allowing users to compare the transcriptions provided in digital form to those images of the original analogue text.\n\nIt is notable that the website provides links to press material and interviews that scholars involved in it have given. This is especially welcome, since we have found that the strongest single correlation between the use of a digital resource and things that its creators do is effective disseminate of information about the project.[ref]Warwick et al., “The Master Builders.”[/ref] The presence of these transcribed interviews shows that its creators have been doing precisely this.\n\nAnother intriguing potential of the digital medium which the Whitman Archive makes use of is the ability to record the way that a resource has changed and grown. Books of course may have later editions, but few of us compare them in detail in printed form. This resource gives us clear information about its past as well as the way it is changing, since it not only archives two previous versions of the project, but provides a detailed change log, which tells users in detail what has been altered and when. For those of us interested in digital resources, this is an unusual insight into their evolution; for regular users of the material it gives instant information about what has changed since their last visit. Both are very much to be welcomed.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 3','It is difficult for me to answer the final question because most to the scholarly material that I need are now available in digital form. As a digital humanist, rather than a literary scholar I have very little need to use original manuscripts or early printed books in my own work. What we know about the research practices of humanity scholars, however...','inherit','open','open','','125-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:53:57','2013-04-18 20:53:57','',125,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/125-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3926,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:01','2013-04-18 20:54:01','It is genuinely difficult to identify serious weaknesses of the Whitman archive. I might suggest a few relatively minor changes to site design. Some of the content is nested quite deeply within the site and requires several clicks to access it. For example in the Disciples section the user is three clicks away from accessing individual poems. Web log analysis suggests that the more clicks a users is required to make, the less likely they are to use that part of a site.[ref]P. Huntington, D. Nicholas, P. Williams and B. Gunter “Characterising the Health Information Consumer: an Examination of the Health Information Sources used by Digital Television Users,” <em>Libri</em> 52:1 (2002): 16-27[/ref] Thus I would suggest that if at all possible some of the intermediate levels of nesting are removed to allow better access to material.\n\nI also found it difficult to access the newspaper content, since the page images took a very long time to load, on an average home broadband connection. This will not cause problems for academics using the site on fast campus networks. However it might limit its usefulness and usability of these newspapers for members of the public to high school students who might be accessing them on a slower connection.\n\nI also had some problems using the search function, or rather understanding the results returned. I typed the words ‘metaphysics’ and ‘books’ into the search box as someone searching for the exact origin of a quotation might do. I would have hoped that the first hit in any general search of the archive might have referred me to published works, but instead it took me to instances of the words in criticism, but it was not clear why this happened, and would, I think be counter intuitive for most users. I then clicked on the top hit of published works, and when I clicked on it, this did indeed take me to Leaves of Grass, but only to the title page. Again this would not be intuitive for users accustomed for example to the functionality of commercial resources such as EEBO who would expect to be taken to the exact hit without a need to use the search function in Firefox to locate it.\n\nThese are technical problems which should be relatively easily corrected. However, I would also like to point out something which while not exactly being a weakness may more correctly be thought of as an opportunity that has not yet been exploited: that is the possibility of involving users more extensively in the Archive’s activities. At present, apart from leaving comments, it is difficult to see how academic users or members of the public interested in Whitman might be able to get involved in the project.\n\nThe current model for the Archive seems very much that of conventional publishing whereby the team produces content for its users, in a one-to-many fashion. It may be that this is a deliberate decision on the part of the editors: involving users is not appropriate for every digital project. However, if further content is to be created in future, the Whitman archive may consider taking part in some kind of crowd sourcing project. This is still a somewhat unusual method, but is being used by projects such as Transcribe Bentham at UCL to access crowd sourced transcriptions of page images of manuscripts. The use of crowd sourcing and social networking by memory institutions such as museums, has demonstrated that those outside academia are interested in participating in projects about their heritage and history and it may be that there is a potential new way for the Archive to engage with its user community, and to add further content while doing so.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 2','It is genuinely difficult to identify serious weaknesses of the Whitman archive.  I might suggest a few relatively minor changes to site design. Some of the content is nested quite deeply within the site and requires several clicks to access it.For example in the Disciples section the user is three clicks away from accessing individual poems.  Web log analysis suggests...','inherit','open','open','','122-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:01','2013-04-18 20:54:01','',122,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/122-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3927,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:06','2013-04-18 20:54:06','The Whitman archive is an example of excellent practice in the creation of digital scholarly resources. Its layout is simple, clear and easy to understand and navigate. It is obvious to a user where she is in the site, how to return to where she started from and what its various contents are. This might seem basic, but many resources, perhaps particularly those designed by and for academics tend not to pay enough attention to the basics of good design and usability, and can, as a result be confusing and frustrating for users. Since we make decisions about web pages in fractions of a second[ref]G. Lindgaard, C. Dudek, F. Fernandes, and J. Brown, “Attention Web Designers: You Have 50 Milliseconds to Make a Good First Impression,” <em>Behaviour &amp; Information Technology</em> 25 (2005): 115-126.[/ref] and humanities users, in particular, are easily deterred from using a resource that seems untrustworthy to them[ref]Claire Warwick, M. Terras, P. Huntington, and N. Pappa, “If You Build It Will They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data,” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 23:1 (2008): 85-102.[/ref] it is vital that such simple considerations as the look and functionality of the site should instantly seem comprehensible and comfortable for users.[ref]Dana Wheeles, “Accessibility, Usability and the New Face of NINES” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 25:4 (2010). Forthcoming.[/ref]\n\nOne of the most impressive things about the Whitman archive is that it can be addressed in different ways depending on the level of expertise the user may have: this is by no means common in scholarly digital resources. As someone who was once worked on English, but not American, literature and who now regards herself as a full time Digital Humanist, I know relatively little about Walt Whitman\'s life and career. As a result of using the archive, however, I was able to find a considerable amount of information at an appropriate level. In other words, this was content of a level well beyond the introductory but which was not simply directed at other Whitman scholars and other expert users. This is a surprisingly difficult balance to achieve in any medium but seems especially challenging in the digital one. Many digital scholarly resources tend to assume that their users will be experts in the subject matter. This is not necessarily the case and as a result non-expert users may easily be confused or lose interest.[ref]Warwick et al., “If You Build It.”[/ref] This seems particularly perverse, since digital resources are an excellent way for scholars to engage with those outside academia who share their interests and to encourage those with an interest to become to sufficiently intrigued that they become the experts of the future. If the non-expert user is deterred, how will they make progress to expertise? This is an opportunity that the Whitman archive has fully understood.\n\nThis does not mean that expert users are neglected, however. The archive has evidently been designed with the needs of its academic users in mind. For example, scholars interested in the language of poetry who may want to run linguistic analysis software on these texts will be particularly please that the full TEI marked up texts are available for downloading from the archive as well as being presented on line. The fact that such texts and detailed markup guidelines are available is an example of excellent practice and also rather unusual. Even some of the best TEI practitioners can seem somewhat nervous of making their markup decisions so public, and many digital humanities resources only make texts available as post-processed XHTML.\n\nThere is also a clear understanding on the part of the Archive’s creators of the way that scholars prefer to work in digital and physical environments. We know, for example, that however many resources are digitised scholars generally want to see the originals. It is now well known that the more digital resources are available the higher the demand that tends to be for original material. As a result, it is especially welcome that the archive has provided such detailed guidance as to how the original materials may be accessed with full bibliographic records. This means that scholars are able to consult manuscript images and transcriptions before they visit physical archives, which enhances, rather than disrupts their use of archival material. This is a particularly effective use of digital resources to complement physical ones.\n\nOne of the most impressive features of the Whitman Archive is that documentation about the project is so easy to access. As we recommended in the LAIRAH study[ref]Claire Warwick, I. Galina, M. Terras, P. Huntington, and N. Pappa, “The Master Builders: LAIRAH Research on Good Practice in the Construction of Digital Humanities Projects,” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 23:3 (2008): 383-396.[/ref] there is a top level link from the title page to documentation about the project. Under this link are to be found a great variety of very useful documents telling readers and users just about anything they might want to know about the archive in terms of its scholarly principles, history, technical standards and encoding guidelines. It is also clear who its creators are their expertise and how this has been used to take decisions about the creation and direction of the archive. This excellent feature is surprisingly difficult to find in many digital archives, editions or resources. However, it is vital, since users require users require this type of contextual information about the processes used to select and interpret data. In the print medium we have evolved techniques and processes to indicate that a selection and evaluation process has taken place (the footnote, the imprimatur, the authorial biography, the bibliography) In the digital world such things are still developing and the digital still remains, for many academic users in particular, less trustworthy than print.[ref]Warwick et al., “If You Build It.”[/ref]','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 1','The Whitman archive is an example of excellent practice in the creation of digital scholarly resources. Its layout is simple, clear and easy to understand and navigate. It is obvious to a user where she is in the site, how to return to where she started from and what its various contents are. This might seem basic, but many resources, perhaps particularly those designed by and for academics...','inherit','open','open','','117-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:06','2013-04-18 20:54:06','',117,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/117-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3928,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:10','2013-04-18 20:54:10','At the <em>Whitman Archive</em> we recently have focused on two aspects of Whitman\'s work: 1) what we call his scribal documents—the letters Whitman copied or drafted for others and the notes and summaries he drafted as a clerk in federal government offices; 2) Whitman\'s crossing of international boundaries as seen in translations and in the remaking of “Whitman” as his work is absorbed into other cultural, literary, and political traditions. In what follows I discuss these new developments to illustrate how the <em>Whitman Archive </em>continues to unfold to reveal new layers for development. After more than fifteen years, the <em>Whitman Archive </em>still intrigues me daily—whether it is Whitman’s writings, the people and processes which bring these texts to the public, the way we make them available, or what we (and others) may be able to do with them in the future. I conclude with a consideration of the long-term viability of our project and the crucial matters of funding and open access.\n\nFor the past two years I have been studying Whitman’s scribal documents and his time in Washington, DC (1863-1873) during and following the Civil War. Whitman worked for the Army Paymaster’s office, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (part of the Department of the Interior), and for the Attorney General’s office. When I first went to Washington to look for documents in Whitman’s handwriting that might have been preserved in the records of these offices, I hoped to find perhaps a half dozen items in the National Archives; seven trips later, I have found close to 3,000.[ref]This research was prompted in part by the Whitman Archive’s recent grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commissions to edit Whitman’s literary works and correspondence from the Civil War and Reconstruction era. These documents are now being transcribed and should be fully available within the next two years.[/ref] Thus far, all of the items are from the Attorney General’s Office. These scribal documents are crucial for understanding Whitman’s Washington years, his position in this particular office, and the influence of this work upon his literary development.\n\nOne document in Whitman’s handwriting, on an envelope of the Attorney General’s Office, says in its entirety:\n<blockquote><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Memoranda</span>\n\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">pardon</span> applicants Sept 8-9 -1865\n\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">also</span> the negro-suffrage\n\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">also position</span> of the President</blockquote>\nThe stationery might suggest that these are notes Whitman made to himself about work in the Attorney General’s office. But are they, and how can we know? Perhaps they are notes about issues Whitman wanted to consider as he was composing “Democratic Vistas.” After all, anyone who has worked with Whitman manuscripts knows that many of his letters and literary manuscripts were written on this type of office stationery and other repurposed pieces of paper. I draw attention to this document not because it is the most powerful of the scribal documents (if it is one[ref]It may be significant that this document was not found where most of the scribal documents have been discovered, in the National Archives, but instead in the Charles E. Feinberg collection at the Library of Congress.[/ref]). I highlight it, in fact, because of its liminal status: we can not determine whether this is a literary or a scribal document, a document written for Whitman\'s own purposes or for the purposes of others. As such, it challenges in a useful way the boundaries between literary and scribal documents.\n\nImagining a firm wall dividing these areas of life for Whitman is misleading. At times, Whitman used his office address as his literary postal address, and he worked in the office at night (the heat and lighting were important benefits). Moreover he first gained his clerkship with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who recommended him on literary and patriotic grounds.[ref]See the letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, 10 January 1863 available at http://whitmanarchive.org/biography/correspondence/cw/tei/nar.00002.html[/ref] And it was because Whitman’s Blue Book (his personal and very heavily revised copy of the third edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>)<em> </em>was found at his government desk that he lost his job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, judged the book to be immoral, though Whitman’s allies staunchly defended it and helped him to secure a new post in the Attorney General’s office. During his Washington years, Whitman\'s literary and clerical lives regularly occurred in the same physical locations and no doubt out of related emotional and psychological circumstances.\n\nOne of the challenges in studying the scribal documents is to figure out what impact Whitman’s work in a series of low-level government positions had on his creative life. To date, critics have almost entirely ignored his ten years of labor in Washington offices. How should we understand and treat the scribal documents? In most cases Whitman acted not as author but as a conduit for the words and thoughts of others. Thus, it could be argued that these documents should not be featured in an archive centrally concerned with Whitman’s writings. If his intellectual contributions to scribal documents are unclear and likely minimal, perhaps these documents should be excluded altogether from the <em>Whitman Archive</em>, or at least not prioritized.[ref]It is not clear yet—we need more time to study this trove of documents—how exactly the Attorney General’s office functioned. Did Whitman merely transcribe a clean copy from a draft written by someone else? Did he sometimes generate the letter based on an outline of points provided by another, or based on comments made in conversation to him? Certainly some of those who supervised him recognized his intellectual capacities. James Speed, for example, sought Whitman’s aid when he prepared an oration dedicating a bust of Abraham Lincoln.[/ref] It could be further argued that we should concentrate our finite time on making available additional known Whitman-authored documents (e.g., his journalism or short stories or novel, <em>Franklin Evans</em>). On the other hand, the scribal documents are potentially more revealing to scholars than such Whitman-authored documents, both because of the quantity of information and because the scribal documents were previously altogether unknown. Scholars may lack perfect access to Whitman’s journalism, short stories, and novel, but they do have reasonably good access for the time being. The same is not true for the scribal documents, and, if the <em>Whitman Archive </em>does not work on these materials, they are likely to remain buried, unavailable to enrich future biographical and critical studies.\n\nWhitman\'s experiences in Washington offices have rich implications. In Washington, Whitman was an actor near the epicenter of government efforts to reshape the nation in the aftermath of war. [ref]Rosemary Graham mistakenly argues that “for the most part . . . Whitman spent these postwar years as an observer.” See “Attorney General’s Office, United States,” in <em>Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia</em>, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland, 1998).[/ref] In his day job as an anonymous clerk, he and others in the office of the Attorney General dealt with postwar experiments with civil rights, war crimes, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, battles over land claims in the west, and an assortment of other matters. He treated closely related matters while revising <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and drafting his probing cultural analysis “Democratic Vistas.” His network of friendships in Washington offices also shaped his ability to get government jobs and to advance his literary career. For example, Whitman sent a copy of his “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm,” published in the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> in February 1869, to an acquaintance named Julius Bing,[ref]Julius Bing (dates unknown) served as the clerk of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in 1867 and 1868 and ghostwrote the 1868 report “Civil Service of the United States” before being appointed diplomatic agent for Crete later that year. A major advocate for reform of the Civil Service, Bing wrote a series of articles on the civil service for the <em>North American Review </em>and <em>Putnam’s Magazine</em> in 1867-1868. For more on Bing, about whom little is known, see Art Hoogenboom, <em>Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement 1865-1883</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), especially 40-49.\n\nAlthough Whitman must have sent at least one letter to Bing, since Bing thanked Whitman for sending a copy of the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> that included Whitman’s “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm” (the poem was published in the February 1869 issue of the magazine), no additional correspondence between Bing and Whitman has been identified to date.[/ref] a clerk of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in 1867 and 1868. In response, Bing wrote a lengthy letter urging Whitman to write a poem about the Child Crusades. The poem was attempted by Whitman but never realized as such (Whitman’s notes on the topic and trial lines can be found in the Thomas B. Harned Collection of the Library of Congress). To the best of my knowledge, this aborted poem has not received any critical commentary, but I think it is well worth study because it is a rare instance of Whitman, in effect, collaborating on a poem, and it also shows him addressing an international issue of the remote past, but one with continuing resonance in his time and in our own.\n\nThe scribal documents also help shed light on Whitman’s increasing interest in international issues in his later writings—his work in the Attorney General’s office meant that he, quite literally, had his hand in international incidents involving Canada, Mexico, Ireland, France, Britain, Spain, China, and many other countries. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> recently has focused increasingly on international issues in more direct ways, too. Since most people in the world first encounter Whitman in a language other than English we are attempting to better serve that audience. We currently provide translations of Whitman\'s work into German, Spanish, and Russian; translations into Ukrainian, Portuguese, and Yiddish are far along in development. In addition, we are in conversation with scholars about expanding our work into Chinese, Polish, Italian and other languages soon. It is fascinating to see what happens to Whitman when he crosses linguistic and cultural borders and becomes absorbed in another milieu. This interaction often illuminates both the hosting cultural tradition as it comes to terms with Whitman as well as the ways that American audiences have interpreted Whitman\'s works.\n\nOne of the strengths of the <em>Archive</em>, related to the digital nature of our work, is the ever-evolving team that has built and continues to build the project. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> has become a training ground and laboratory for the next generation of literary scholars and digital humanists. The staff of the <em>Whitman Archive</em>—largely made up of graduate students—get hands-on experience and serve as apprentices of sorts. These graduate students serve as assistant editors and often attain positions of considerable responsibility within the project. I have been delighted by the diverse career paths our “alumni” have taken: one has gained a faculty position in a library; another works at the vice-chancellor level at a major university in an information technology role; some have gained tenure track positions at research-oriented institutions; others are employed at digital centers in various roles. Collectively they have demonstrated a range of ways to succeed professionally; their lives offer hope in a time of difficult job prospects in the humanities.\n\nAlthough the creation of the <em>Whitman Archive</em>—a vast and still rapidly growing resource—has cost a great deal of money, we are able to make it freely available. One of the strengths of the <em>Archive</em>, then, stems from success in garnering local support from several key institutions, a steady stream of grant support from four different federal agencies, and donations from various individuals and private foundations. These fundraising efforts culminated in the creation of a permanent endowment to support ongoing editorial work. We realize that this ongoing work could potentially reach far into the future, and we strive to make our work reusable for later scholars (so they can improve upon it) by documenting our practices and decisions. Having an endowment obliges us to think in longer terms than is common for scholars: we have the burden and advantage of a project that should continue well beyond the lives of anyone now working on the <em>Whitman Archive</em>.\n\nFor end users a key advantage of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is that it makes freely available what would otherwise be difficult, costly, or impossible to access. The nature and extent of our audience are changed profoundly because the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is freely available, changes that are all to the good in my view. Instead of working with a small audience of specialist scholars in mind, we now also consider our large, varied, international audience as well. The importance of open access can hardly be overestimated. For us, open access means more than making content freely available for reading and analysis; it means making content freely available for reuse and repurposing. We willingly share files and have people work with them and reuse them in projects as long as those projects also are open, and they cite the <em>Archive</em>.\n\nDespite what the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> has accomplished thus far, we recognize that some features are lacking and that other features should be improved. The current search capability of the <em>Archive </em>is fairly limited and fails to take full advantage of our encoding, a key contribution to Whitman scholarship. Upcoming developments make me optimistic about leveraging the <em>Archive</em>’s rich encoding in more sophisticated ways, however, and experiments in indexing and searching the <em>Archive</em> are ongoing. The text base we’ve developed and continue to develop will lend itself to experimentation—by us and others, and we have rightly spent fifteen years developing the corpus so that it can be read, researched, and used by a variety of audiences employing a range of technologies and methodologies. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> also provides for the study of a new scholarly form, thanks to our documentation including encoding guidelines, history, and essays about the <em>Archive</em>. What seems clear is that the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is one of a group of projects that are demonstrating how the print-based monumental scholarly edition can be reimagined and advanced in the form of an electronic archive.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 4','At the Whitman Archive we recently have focused on two aspects of Whitman\'s work: 1) what we call his scribal documents—the letters Whitman copied or drafted for others and the notes and summaries he drafted as a clerk in federal government offices; 2) Whitman\'s crossing of international boundaries as seen in translations and in the remaking of “Whitman” as his work is absorbed into other cultural, literary, and political traditions.','inherit','open','open','','114-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:10','2013-04-18 20:54:10','',114,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/114-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3929,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:18','2013-04-18 20:54:18','A comparison of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> to its print predecessor, <em>The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman</em>,[ref]When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued twenty-two volumes, many more than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. For example, the poetry manuscripts and periodical printings of Whitman\'s poetry were never collected, and the long-promised journalism, projected to appear in six volumes, never appeared in the NYUP edition. Peter Lang eventually published two volumes of the journalism in 1998 and 2003, though these volumes cover only the period from 1834–1848, leaving Whitman\'s innumerable contributions to periodicals in the final forty-four years of his life still to be edited. The Peter Lang volumes are produced so as to replicate the appearance of the New York University Press edition, though the editors of that series (all now deceased) did not oversee their production. Arguably, the Peter Lang volumes constitute volumes 23 and 24 of the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, and a 25th volume, treating recently discovered correspondence, edited by Ted Genoways, was published by University of Iowa Press in 2004.[/ref] helps to clarify the advantages and disadvantages of digital and analog forms. Despite the many achievements of the print volumes in the <em>Collected Writings of Walt Whitman</em>, this editorial project ultimately became quite chaotic. Whitman\'s outgoing correspondence, for example, has been the subject of editorial treatment since the 1960s, when Edwin Haviland Miller edited five volumes of Whitman’s correspondence. Miller arranged the volumes chronologically, and with the fifth volume, he published an addendum of sixty-five letters that he uncovered even as the first four volumes appeared. Although this addendum meant that some letters would always be out of order, the complications of working with this single addition or revision were not insurmountable. Nine years later, however, a sixth volume appeared, and it included one hundred additional letters, complicating the organization further. Then, in 1991, Miller published fifty new letters in the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>,<em> </em>and Ted Genoways published third and fourth supplements of nearly one hundred letters in the journal<em> </em>in 2000 and 2002. In 2004, the University of Iowa Press issued a seventh volume of Whitman\'s correspondence, which included all of Whitman\'s letters found since Miller\'s sixth volume. In the end, there were nearly as many supplements as the number of Miller\'s original volumes, and over the last six years, even more letters have surfaced. This one aspect of the <em>Collected Writings</em> illustrates how print editions can devolve into disorder, even when the initial aim is to bring order to the literary record. I am confident that after the <em>Whitman Archive</em> “finishes” work on the correspondence previously unknown or lost letters will surface somewhere. It is a great strength of the digital medium that when this happens, new material can be integrated seamlessly into the collection.\n\nIn a related way, our “Integrated Guide to Walt Whitman’s Poetry Manuscripts” aggregates facsimile images of all surviving drafts of Whitman’s poems regardless of their geographical dispersion. The digital images and integrated guide bring order to the manuscripts and, for most purposes, erase the need to travel in order to study the manuscripts. (Individual repositories may have labeled an item by its first line or its working title, but we have created an overarching virtual order for all repositories, and we have labeled each individual poetry manuscript with what we call a “work” identifier based on the title of the last published version of the manuscript.) The high quality color facsimiles available on the <em>Archive</em> offer significant advantages for the study of the manuscripts; the images can be manipulated in photo-editing software to help us decipher otherwise illegible handwriting or zoom in on features of the ink, paper, and other characteristics such as pinholes, in order to offer new readings about the manuscripts and their relationships to one another.\n\nDespite the integrated guide’s utility, however, it remains an under-utilized resource. Indeed, one of our challenges has been how to make sure people find the content and tools most useful for their research questions. Perhaps a downside of bringing together so much material in one place is that doing so can inadvertently re-bury material (in some places, the organizational hierarchy of the <em>Archive</em> is fairly flat or one-dimensional, and in others, it is quite structured). It is hard to get a sense of the magnitude of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> at a glance. The more we enrich the site, the more challenging it becomes to keep the interface simple, straightforward, intuitive, and sufficiently informative.\n\nBooks are sometimes more convenient in various ways. The failure of a server does not make individual volumes of the <em>Collected Writings</em> temporarily disappear. For most practical purposes, the <em>Collected Writings</em> as a resource stays stable (and carries all the advantages and disadvantages of that condition). Print can rely on nicely developed interface and design that evolved over centuries, but digital conventions are still relatively young and therefore sometimes neither clear nor aesthetically pleasing.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 3','A comparison of the Whitman Archive to its print predecessor, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,[ref]When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued twenty-two volumes, many more than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. ','inherit','open','open','','111-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:18','2013-04-18 20:54:18','',111,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/111-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3930,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:22','2013-04-18 20:54:22','Some weaknesses of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> are a function of its stage of development. We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged. For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users <em>are</em> quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas are underdeveloped: we provide all known contemporary reviews of Whitman’s writings, but a person could legitimately ask why have we not, then, provided other essays about Whitman from the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, all out of copyright, which might shed even more light on Whitman than do these reviews. Only in the last few months have we made available any of Whitman’s prose, and we have done little thus far with Whitman’s journalism. We value his journalism and have made plans for editing it, but we have not had time yet to see significant results in this area.\n\nCurrently, the <em>Whitman Archive</em> also lacks sufficient integration of material across the site. For example, if Horace Traubel mentions a specific Whitman poem in <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, we should offer ready access to that particular version (and possibly also other versions of the poem). We could also link the poem to commentary, including contemporary reviews, books from the University of Iowa Press Whitman series, and articles from the full run of the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>. Individual essays from <em>WWQR</em> currently are linked from citations in the criticism bibliography, and we hope to integrate more fully this journal of record for Whitman studies with the <em>Whitman Archive</em>. This more complete integration of content, like most of the changes I would suggest for the <em>Archive</em>, will be undertaken as time allows.\n\nWe are also currently investigating the application of Web 2.0 features and functionality for the <em>Archive</em>, in hopes of enabling collaboration and interaction with users of the <em>Archive</em>.<em> </em>Ideally, we would like to harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of our users. As a first step in this direction, <em>Archive </em>staff at the University of Texas at Austin are exploring user accounts for the <em>Archive</em>, accounts which would allow users both to contribute to the <em>Archive</em> as well as to create their own collections of materials. Early work is also under way on a database designed to track the what, when, and how of Whitman’s reading—that is, what did Whitman read, when did he read it, and how do we know that he read a particular text? We believe that our user community could help us populate the database. Similar resources could be integrated into the <em>Whitman Archive</em> and include user-generated information: accounts of Whitman appearances in films, television shows, advertisements, and novels, for example. Users might also participate in attribution studies. Whitman is known to have contributed to the <em>Armory Square Hospital Gazette </em>during the Civil War<em>. </em>No complete run of the newspaper exists, however, and no pieces bear Whitman’s signature. User-collaborators could help us track down scattered issues of this rare paper as well as generate a lively and informative debate about the authorship of unattributed essays in the paper. As a scholarly site, we must strike the right balance between openness and scholarly rigor, and a fundamental question for us is how to encourage participation while insuring that quality control checks remain in place. We also hope to allow users with accounts to work with the texts and data of the <em>Whitman Archive </em>in order to explore their own interpretations. Sophisticated users might access our XML and XSLT files in a work area where they could alter the encoding and stylesheets in order to pursue particular interpretive goals.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 2','Some weaknesses of the Whitman Archive are a function of its stage of development.  We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged.  For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users are quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas...','inherit','open','open','','109-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:22','2013-04-18 20:54:22','',109,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/109-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3931,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:26','2013-04-18 20:54:26','At this time, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it<em> </em>has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman\'s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection,[ref]Carole L. Palmer, \"Thematic Research Collections,\" In <em>A Companion to Digital Humanities</em> (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 348-65.[/ref] so we include both Whitman-authored pieces and incoming correspondence, reviews of his writings, selected recent criticism, and other materials not usually included in \"collected works.\" We aspire to produce the richest possible resource for the study of his writings, life, and reception. Our annotated bibliography, the logical starting point for scholarly work on the poet, includes all known critical writings about Whitman from 1839 to the present day—it comprises over 14,000 entries and continues to grow. The site receives a great deal of traffic: in a typical recent month (February 2010) we had nearly 39,000 visits to our site, more than 30,000 of which were by unique visitors.\n\nAs a project co-director, I coordinate the ongoing work necessary to build it. (Ed Folsom and I work closely with Elizabeth Lorang, the current project manager, in this capacity.) The site is less <em>used</em> in my work than it regularly <em>constitutes</em> a major part of my work as a scholar. At times, though, I employ the site in much the same manner as other literary scholars, albeit with greater knowledge of the site’s strengths and limitations and with awareness of material now in the pipeline that isn’t currently available to the public. As a literary critic, I appreciate what the <em>Whitman Archive</em> makes newly possible. For example, those of us writing about Whitman can now trace the development of his poetry across multiple versions—in isolated manuscript drafts; in notebooks; in periodical printings; and in various book publications—in a way that was all but unimaginable before the advent of the Web. His manuscripts are dispersed at nearly one hundred repositories around the world. In some cases, what was once a single manuscript has become separated into parts, with different sections of the manuscript held in repositories separated by great distance. Such manuscripts can now be virtually reunited.\n\nThe <em>Whitman Archive</em> has become fundamental to criticism, but citation of the <em>Archive</em> lags behind its actual use. A recent study by Lisa Spiro and Jane Segal indicates that many people use major American literature web sites, including the <em>Whitman Archive</em>, only to then cite print sources.[ref]“The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research” available at\nhttp://library.rice.edu/services/dmc/about/projects/the-impact-of-digital-resources-on-humanities-research\n[/ref] This ill-conceived practice needs to change in order for digital humanities to get its due. To enable people to reference individual parts of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> more easily, all <em>Archive </em>pages will soon include additional metadata for use with Zotero and other reference management software<em>.</em> In my own scholarly practice, I have cited the <em>Whitman Archive</em> many times, and when Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and I compiled the collection <em>Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays</em> (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), we advised all contributors to cite the <em>Whitman Archive</em> when referring to Whitman texts.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 1','At this time, the Walt Whitman Archive is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman\'s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection...','inherit','open','open','','107-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:26','2013-04-18 20:54:26','',107,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/107-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3932,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:35','2013-04-18 20:54:35','There are some fascinating strengths of this archive behind or beyond its more obvious assets. The more obvious include: a) bringing together in one “place” historical sources whose originals are widely scattered geographically; b) providing scans of sufficient density and size to permit scholars to examine at least some aspects of the original paper and photographic emulsion, a degree of quality that most digital archives do not have sufficient wherewithal to capture and maintain; c) producing an edited “publication” of Whitman’s papers in such a manner that researchers gain access to gradually increasing content rather than having to wait until the entirety of a printed volume is produced; d) “free” access from anywhere, rather than the purchase or travel expense to use a print edition or to visit various repositories.\n\nSome of the less obvious strong points can be uncovered only by reading the “About the Archive” sections exhaustively, something I suspect relatively few site visitors do. For example, in Matt Cohen’s “Transgenic Deformation: Literary Translation and the Digital Archive” (2006),<strong> </strong>the author identifies a subtle but important parallel between the increasing understanding within the archival profession that archivists’ work can no longer pretend to be objective, neutral, and invisible and the necessity from an editorial standpoint of “articulating stylesheets and XML markup [to users]…. In turn, translation seems to demand that archives explain their interface designs along with their markup strategies.”[ref]From The Walt Whitman Archive website (hereafter TWWA), <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html</a>. For those not familiar with the parallel archival concerns, particularly as they relate to arrangement, description, and cataloging, please see Michelle Light and Tom Hyry: “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid,” American Archivist 65 (Fall/Winter 2002): 216-230.[/ref]\n\nCohen’s article also represents a broader strong point of the archive, which is the extensive “about” section, including more effort at self-analysis, elucidation of goals and values, lessons learned and challenges faced than the vast majority of other sites I’ve visited. Moreover, in the “Articles and Interviews” subsection the pieces contain an admirable blend of technical discussions,[ref]For example, Brett Barney and Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00006.html\">\"\'What I Assume You Shall Assume\': The <em>Whitman Archive</em> and the Challenge of Integrating Different Open Standards,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2004).[/ref] more traditional scholarship, [ref]For example, Geoffrey Saunders Schramm, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00007.html\">\"Whitman\'s Lifelong Endeavor: <em>Leaves of Grass</em> at 150,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2005).[/ref] and what I think of as philosophical musings.[ref]For example, Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html\">\"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?</a>” <em>TWWA</em> (2009).[/ref]The simple fact that there are 12 years worth of articles and interviews relating to the archive gives a glimpse into the evolution of technology, priorities, and philosophies.[ref]Compare, for example, the Cohen article already cited to an earlier analysis of textual markup in the <em>Archive</em>, Brett Barney, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html\">\"\'Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle\': Reflections after Tagging the 1867 <em>Leaves of Grass,</em>\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2001).[/ref] This relatively rich context to the project and the archive is increasingly necessary, I believe, not only because of the increasing imperative for archivists, particularly, to make their work transparent to their users, but also to spread the value of such projects as far beyond the particular scholarly community being served as possible.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 1','There are some fascinating strengths of this archive behind or beyond its more obvious assets.  The more obvious include:  a) bringing together in one “place” historical sources whose originals are widely scattered geographically; b) providing scans of sufficient density and size to permit scholars to examine at least some aspects of the original paper and photographic emulsion...','inherit','open','open','','83-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:35','2013-04-18 20:54:35','',83,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/83-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3933,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:39','2013-04-18 20:54:39','The weaknesses I have noticed in the <em>Archive</em> are not unique to this site. One problem is the site’s misunderstanding—and thus its improper assertion—of copyrights.[ref]I am a founding member of the Society of American Archivists’ Intellectual Property Working Group.[/ref] Specifically the site asserts the existence of copyright in the transcripts and facsimiles and more broadly in Whitman’s writings—because transcripts and facsimiles are “slavish copies” neither is entitled to copyright protection;[ref]The term is from the U.S. Second District Court of New York’s decision in <em>Bridgeman Art Library Ltd v. Corel Corporation</em>, 1998.[/ref]published or unpublished anything written by Whitman is in the public domain.[ref]See “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/conditions.html\">Conditions of Use</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>. Unpublished works are public domain for authors deceased prior to 1940; published works for everything published prior to 1923. For an authoritative source, see Peter Hirtle, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States: 1 January 2010,” online at <a href=\"http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm\">http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm</a>.[/ref] Only original contributions of editors are copyrightable at this late date.[ref]Such mistakes are not unique to <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, certainly. Copyright statements for the <em>In the Valley of the Shadow</em> Civil War project (<a href=\"http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/copyright.html\">http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/copyright.html</a>) and the <em>Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition</em> site (<a href=\"http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.privacy.xml&amp;_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl\">http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.privacy.xml&amp;_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl</a>) are much more egregious.[/ref] What distresses me about the inaccuracies is they suggest that there are limits to use of the main site content by researchers—notwithstanding frequent assertions that the purpose of the archive is “to make Whitman\'s vast work electronically accessible” to all.[ref]Katherine L. Walter and Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00001.html\">\"An Online Guide to Walt Whitman\'s Dispersed Manuscripts,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2004).[/ref] Making the archive accessible but incorrectly claiming limitations on actual use is paradoxical at best.\n\nThere are other issues causing me unease, for example the inadequacy of site use data. The site does not regularly report use statistics, and what statistics it does provide—average daily hits in 2007[ref]Ed Folsom, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html\">\"Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2007).[/ref]--are of dubious value even when current.[ref]Google Analytics: “the number of hits a website receives is not a valid popularity gauge, but rather is an indication of server use and loading” (<a href=\"http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=33026\">http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=33026</a>). Better measures are unique visitors or page views, coupled with visits’ duration.[/ref] In addition there is little similar data at similar websites to compare to (though to their credit one of the site editors did gather some parallel data in 2008).[ref]The data, from the <em>Willa Cather Archive</em> and the <em>Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,</em> is<em> </em>presented in Kenneth M. Price,<strong> </strong><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00267.html\">\"Electronic Scholarly Editions,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2008).[/ref] Thus this is an endemic weakness of major “archive” sites, a weakness related to a broader disinterest in the economics and sustainability of such sites.[ref]And of bricks and mortar archival operations, though this is beginning to change, as suggested by the questions—“Does the level of onsite use of special collections justify the resources being expended? What are the most appropriate measures by which to evaluate use?”—in Jackie M. Dooley and Katherine Luce, <em>Taking Our Pulse: The OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives</em> (OCLC, 2010), 34-36, online at <a href=\"http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf\">http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf</a>.[/ref] The greater viability of websites such as <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> is ultimately the $64,000 question and the focus of my essay for Part II of this roundtable.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 2','The weaknesses I have noticed in the Archive are not unique to this site.  One problem is the site’s misunderstanding—and thus its improper assertion—of copyrights. Specifically the site asserts the existence of copyright in the transcripts and facsimiles and more broadly in Whitman’s writings—because transcripts and facsimiles are “slavish copies” neither is entitled to copyright protection...','inherit','open','open','','88-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:39','2013-04-18 20:54:39','',88,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/88-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3934,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:43','2013-04-18 20:54:43','The digital form highlights a question faced by every project or repository working to build online digital collections from analog originals. The digital form permits creation of extremely high density and equally high quality facsimiles,[ref]Scanning requirements are in “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/technical_summary.html\">Technical Summary</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>.[/ref] making it possible to determine physical characteristics of the original impossible to consider during the era of microfilm or photocopying. For example, project transcribers can apparently discern\n<ul>\n	<li>ink blots, smudges, and stray pen marks;</li>\n	<li>pin holes;</li>\n	<li>embossing;</li>\n	<li>variations in ink, pencil, or paper;</li>\n	<li>distinctions between single and multiple overstrikes[ref]From “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/mediawiki/index.php/Whitman_Encoding_Guidelines#What_Not_to_Encode\">5.9.1 What Not to Encode</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>.[/ref]</li>\n</ul>\nWhile these are “what not to encode,” they denote the expectation that facsimiles supplied to the transcribers are capable of producing such details. As an extra measure of quality, “project staff <em>examine each digital image</em> [when creating JPEGs from original TIFF files] <em>cleaned and cropped</em> for web delivery.”[ref]“Technical Summary,” emphases added.[/ref] The intricate encoding guidelines themselves are also part of making high quality facsimiles accessible.\n\nThe opportunity cost of demanding extremely high standards encompasses both a slow pace of making facsimiles accessible to users and the ability to create a complete archive of Whitman material—this latter price due to the inevitable (though not supportable) decision by some repositories to decline participation if it requires public accessibility to such high quality scans.[ref]See “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html\">History of the Project</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>, for brief discussion of some libraries’ requirement to limit user access to 72 dpi facsimiles.[/ref] There is nothing inherently logical about sacrificing a complete collection for highest-quality facsimiles. Nor is there innate reason for choosing quality over quantity, particularly since one can structure a project whereby “inferior” facsimiles are placed online relatively quickly while higher-quality facsimiles are posted, gradually, later. The question of whether (and which) users are best served by large quantity rather than high quality is one accurately answered only by asking users themselves. Surveys or focus groups for gathering user input have not been employed by <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> it appears—but neither have they been used by the vast majority of projects and repositories creating online collections.\n\nFor a decade now I have been actively involved in projects to increase the quantity of archival material accessible to users at the expense of traditional notions of quality. What began as an effort to speed processing of large modern manuscript (hidden) collections has evolved into jeremiads on trading speed for precision in most other aspects of archives administration as well—including the creation, description, and mounting of digital facsimiles online.[ref]See, particularly, Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” <em>American Archivist</em>, 68:2 (Fall/Winter 2005), 208-263 and Mark A. Greene, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” <em>American Archivist</em> 73:1 (Spring/Summer 2010), 175-203.[/ref] In some cases, including processing and digitization, there is direct evidence that some users prefer “more” over “better” at a ratio of about two-to-one. Far more research is required, certainly, and we should never assume that what holds true for one project/repository and its audience holds equally true for all. But we should certainly be more anxious to determine the answers than we have been heretofore.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 3','The digital form highlights a question faced by every project or repository working to build online digital collections from analog originals.  The digital form permits creation of extremely high density and equally high quality facsimiles, making it possible to determine physical characteristics of the original impossible to consider during the era of microfilm or photocopying...','inherit','open','open','','90-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:43','2013-04-18 20:54:43','',90,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/90-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3935,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:47','2013-04-18 20:54:47','I give a great credit to <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> co-director Kenneth Price for taking a critical look at the costs associated with an endeavor such as his.\n<blockquote>[M]any people, myself included, have described our site as free, yet a considerable amount of resources continue to go into its making. I want to explore that conundrum. … When users visit a deep scholarly archive on the web they are experiencing the (mostly real) benefit of displaced costs. Instead of money being spent by the user at the point of contact, money is spent elsewhere along the line: by universities in the form of faculty time, equipment, graduate student assistance, and internal grants; by external funding agencies; and, in our case, curiously, by more than one publisher. … We might ask: Is what the Whitman archive has done a sustainable model for the production of other full-scale scholarly editions on the web? We have been fortunate with grants, publishers, libraries, and generous universities. But if it requires such a constellation of good fortune to produce an electronic scholarly edition, do we have a sound economic model in place? As the questions imply, I don\'t think we do.[ref]Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00004.html\">\"Dollars and Sense in Collaborative Digital Scholarship: The Example of the <em>Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive</em>,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2001).[/ref]</blockquote>\nYet for all his candor, and the importance of that candor, he does not take the next (and even more difficult) step of analyzing the project’s benefits as well as its costs. Saying such an online archival endeavor is not sustainable is, in part, to say it does not (cannot, I will suggest) provide sufficient benefits to sustain continuing such costs. For me this is part of a larger question about how and why we allocate archival resources. I have no particular bone to pick with the <em>Whitman Archive</em>; I have raised similar concerns about the disproportionate staff and monetary resources devoted by bricks and mortar repositories to literary collections as a genre, congressional papers as a genre,[ref]Mark A. Greene, \"Appraisal of Congressional Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society: A Case Study,\" <em>Archival Issues</em> 19:1 (1994), 31-44.<em> </em>Republished in <em>An American Political Archives Reader,</em> Karen Dawley Paul , Glenn R Gray , and L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin eds. (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009), 181-96.[/ref] university records as a genre, state/county/local court records as a genre, and general store records as a genre[ref]Mark A. Greene, “From Village Smithy to Superior Vacuum Technology: Modern Small Business Records and the Collecting Repository,” <em>Archival Issues</em> 23:1 (1998), 41-58.[/ref]—all categories of records I believe are represented disproportionately in repositories and given disproportionate attention by archivists.\n\nAn argument that resource expenditure is disproportionate requires some comparison. As my then colleague at the Minnesota Historical Society wrote in 1998,\n<blockquote>while politics is an important component of Minnesota history, it is at least arguable that its importance is not so great as the resources that the Society has devoted to documenting it. Neither the stack space nor the staff time is sufficient to swallow Congressional collections whole and still be able appropriately to document business, recreation, family life, etc. for Minnesota. We had to ask: ‘Do we really need 116 feet of material to document Congressman Tom Hagedorn’s eight years in office when we keep 110 feet for nearly seventy years of the St. Paul Area United Way?’[ref]Todd J. Daniels-Howell, “Reappraisal of Congressional Records at the Minnesota Historical Society,” <em>Archival Issues </em>23:1 (1998), 36.[/ref]</blockquote>\nThis was hardly a precise comparison, to be sure, but it was an early attempt to ask archivists to consider the theretofore reflexive resource allocation required to document congressional service to the nth degree compared to both the opportunity costs and the relative benefit (to a repository’s users) of shifting resources to other acquisition, processing, and preservation goals. It is not that Hagedorn’s congressional tenure was value-<em>less</em> nor that the United Way’s records were objectively more valuable, only that we had never before considered the relative costs and benefits.\n\nSuch comparison is no easy matter, granted. It might be abstractly valid to ask whether it is a good allocation of resources to develop an exhaustive online archives for Walt Whitman when there are not such efforts underway for, say, Theodore Roosevelt,[ref]At least so far as I can discover, though I did not perform a truly exhaustive search.[/ref] but the fact is we have no mechanism to determine, in any way that is even vaguely acceptable on a wide scale, whether one historical figure is more “deserving” of such a site than another. And even if we did, we don’t have a mechanism for ensuring that the more deserving figure would automatically generate the structure necessary to solicit and manage the resources that might then be available. And if we succeeded in identifying such mechanisms there would still loom the matter of judging relative quantity and quality of use of the sites—use being, I believe, the “end of all archival effort.”[ref]Theodore R. Schellenberg, <em>The Management of Archives</em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 108. I have pursued the idea of the centrality of use to archival work most extensively in “’The Surest Proof’: The Use of Business Records and Implications for Appraisal,” <em>Archivaria</em> 45 (Spring 1998), 127-69 and later in Greene and Meissner, “More Product, Less Process.”[/ref]\n\nSo is this a purely rhetorical exercise? I don’t think so. As difficult as these questions are to answer with precision, they remain necessary questions and there are pieces of answers available once we start asking. My plea is that we do start asking, that we do start expecting to define quantitative and qualitative measure of the costs and benefits of such projects and, by extension, of our bricks and mortar archival endeavors as well. Not only do I think we owe it to our constituents and funders, I also believe it will increasingly be demanded by our administrators.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 4','I give a great credit to The Walt Whitman Archive co-director Kenneth Price for taking a critical look at the costs associated with an endeavor such as his. \"[M]any people, myself included, have described our site as free, yet a considerable amount of resources continue to go into its making. I want to explore that conundrum.\"','inherit','open','open','','104-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:47','2013-04-18 20:54:47','',104,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/104-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3936,1,'2013-04-18 21:06:25','2013-04-18 21:06:25','In this issue, five contributors address how hands-on work with archives has been incorporated into undergraduate education.  They each answer a series of five questions to report on what they have done, what worked or not, and what value bringing archives into the classroom, or the classroom into the archive, has.  We invite you to read through the responses by author or by question.','Undergraduates in the Archives','','inherit','open','open','','1500-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 21:06:25','2013-04-18 21:06:25','',1500,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/1500-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3937,1,'2013-04-18 20:54:53','2013-04-18 20:54:53','In this issue, five contributors critique and analyze <em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/\" target=\"_blank\">The Walt Whitman Archive</a></em> by answering four questions about this digital archive. We invite you to read through the roundtable by question or by author.','The Walt Whitman Archive','','inherit','open','open','','336-revision-3','','','2013-04-18 20:54:53','2013-04-18 20:54:53','',336,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/no-issue/uncategorized/336-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0);
