Network(Analysis(and(Mapping( Postdoctoral Training for Social Network Analysis and Mapping: Social Network Analysis: An Introduction (Summer 2013) at The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Additional training through Omeka & Neatline Workshop (Spring 2014) at NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks, Northeastern University. Mary Prince’s Network Mansfield Park Network
Research Projects: Images from “Imagined Empires in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park” and “Mapping Mary Prince” (November 2104) at EmilyMNKugler.com, part of a book project, An Acceptable Happiness: Marriage, Empire, and Other Failures in Anglophone Domestic Fiction. My work on women writing in response to empire employs my training in social network analysis in order to spatially map the relationship between human and nonhuman actors. In the case of Jane Austen’s novels, this approach is grounded in a literary analysis that takes the objects in domestic spaces and links them to a global network of British imperialism. The example on the left (using Google Fusion) connects the space of Fanny Price’s attic room to Mansfield Park’s investment in British military involvement in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and China.
In the case of Mary Prince and her slave narrative, social network analysis methods allow me to trace how her relationship to kin and household networks in Bermuda becomes complicated first by the vast amount of geographic distance she transverses in the Atlantic (as seen in the map on the right, with its admittedly oddly scaled warping of a historical map), as well as her entry into religious and racial diaspora networks that granted her access to London political and publication circles, which in turns allowed her to de facto selfmanumit (as seen in the network graph above right). Public Humanities: Part of my work for the Boston Middle Passage Port Marker Ceremony (August 2014) involves building an online resource for the event (funded by the National Park Service). The timeline of New England slavery and a map linking colonial slavery to current National Park Service tours (screenshots to the left) were created using Northwestern University’s Knightlab mapping and timeline tools. These along with a non-linear multimedia platform, likely Scalar, will also be used in related project on the slave ship Desire (in progress grant applications to Rhode Island Council of Humanities and Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University). Teaching: These examples were chosen specifically because the tools used can be easily integrated into introductory and advanced classes. With the exception of Google Earth, none of them require students to download a program, most lend themselves easily to collaborative work, and in the case of the Knightlab tools, can be combined into larger online exhibit. In terms of mapping, Omeka’s add-on Neatline would also work in the classroom or for larger instructional projects.
Kugler,!Emily!MN!/!MLA!Handout,!Page 1 of 4!
Data Visualization and Data Mining
!
Research Projects: Images from “Visual Narratives Of British Abolitionist Networks” (March 2014) at EmilyMNKugler.com; part of in progress database, Exotic Domesticities: Labor, Luxury, and Global Slavery in Imperial British Trade (Humanities Grant and Supplemental Grant, Colby College, 2013-2014) and book project, An Acceptable Happiness: Marriage, Empire, and Other Failures in Anglophone Domestic Fiction. Working from the subscriber lists to the early-authorized editions of Oladuah Equiano’s autobiography (excluding editions printed in Scotland and Ireland), I created a dataset of individuals with name, probable sex, rank, marital status, and location. Organizing subscribers into households, I investigate women likely acting independently in support of The Narrative, and by extension potentially publically marking their political involvement in the transatlantic abolitionist movement. The initial example on the left, a screenshot from my website, shows the geographic distribution of the subscribers with the following tables illustrating select demographics. The map was created using Google Fusion and is easily incorporated into classes.
Teaching Example: An assignment from my class Outlaws and Outsiders in Early 18th-Century British Literature (Fall 2010) expanded for a Digital Humanities Course. Phase 1 (from original assignment): Central Questions: Consider how in the reading so far actions, identities, and concepts are criminalized or otherwise marginalized by characters as well as by the texts’ narrative assumptions. To what extent does this reflect the historical context? Consider both what the texts may take for granted, actively support, or potentially critique. Using the Old Bailey Online’s Search Page, perform exploratory searches based on its categories. Consider using character’s personal and family names, as well as offenses and punishments. Keep the time frame you select in mind: do you note changes over time (the database covers 1679 to 1913). Write a short response to your findings and how you see it relating to the rest of course. Phase 2 (expansion): Using your initial exploration of the database, assemble a corpus of texts to analyze. Select a central question for your research and set up the parameters of your searches. Note information such as number of cases, locations, sex of victim/defendant, etc. Save your “query url”; then run it through the connected visualization tool, Voyant. Save your results. Begin drafting a response to your findings. These will be incorporated in to your final project at the end of semester (depending on the course, this could be a literary research paper, an analysis of digital humanities projects, or digital exhibition on a related topic. Related Reading (varies by course level): Datamining with Criminal Intent Project website (project analyzing data from the Old Bailey Online), Trevor Owen's "Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?" from the Journal of Digital Humanities 1.1 (Winter 2011), and Jacques Derrida's "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression" from Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63.
Kugler,!Emily!MN!/!MLA!Handout,!Page 2 of 4!
Digital Scholarly Editing, Research
!
Postdoctoral Training for Digital Scholarly Editing: Teaching the History of the Book (Summer 2013), XML in Action: Creating Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Text (Summer 2013), Analytical Bibliography (Summer 2014) at the Rare Book School, University of Virginia. Additional training through workshops Taking TEI Further: Teaching With TEI (Fall 2014) from Women Writers Project, Northeastern University, and Liberate the Text!! (while Creating a Publishable, Digital Textual Edition) (Spring 2014), ASECS Annual Meeting Research Projects: Encoding transcriptions of political and government documents forms a large part of my in progress database, Exotic Domesticities: Labor, Luxury, and Global Slavery in Imperial British Trade. Using documents at the Providence Public Library and John Carter Brown Library, I am creating a database of the texts, their editions, the locations of those, as well as their digital surrogates. My transcriptions focus on pamphlets from the 1788 British slave trade debate, focusing on ameliorist and pro-trade positions, as I have found these are less likely to be digitized in major databases or projects, such as Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. I am currently encoding them using the EXtensible Markup Language (XML) editing program Oxygen with a simple Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) schema that physically describes the document, and will eventually tag for locations and citations within those texts in order to create data visualizations of these texts. The initial publication of these digitally edited texts will be on Juxta Commons (which collates and compares TEI-encoding texts) and TAPAS (a platform for archiving and displaying TEI projects). The above screenshot shows an encoded transcription and rough draft of an xml file as digital edition. The beauty of XML/TEI encoding is that by tagging the text, a database is created, which can be exported into other forms. Essentially, the creating of a digital edition makes the text accessible to the visualization, network, mapping, and other data mining tools discussed above.
Harvard University - Collection Development Department, Widener Library, HCL / Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions; House Unpassed Legislation 1782, Docket 955, SC1/series 230. Massachusetts Archives. Boston, Mass.
Public Humanities: In creating the website Boston Middle Passage Port Marker Ceremony, I am working with researchers at the Harvard Law School Library digitizing Massachusetts State Archive records of slaves petitioning for their freedom (see example to the left). The goal is to create a clear transcription of this hand-written documents along with brief biographically information on the petitioners. I am also pursuing grants from regional and national sources for a collaborative public history project on the slave ship Desire, which will include both live and digital exhibitions, the latter of which will incorporate oral histories from Pequot communities in New England and Bermuda. As a whole, the project aims to draw attention to histories of indigenous groups within histories of slavery and settler colonialism in the Atlantic World, as well as how deeply embedded slavery was in the economic and cultural development of New England.
Kugler,!Emily!MN!/!MLA!Handout,!Page 3 of 4!
Digital Scholarly Editing, Teaching ! Teaching: In addition to digital humanities practices, I frequently introduce students to archival research in my courses. Transcribing and creating a scholarly edition of manuscript or older print texts draw students’ attention to the book as a cultural object as well as a form of technology. Close readings of the materiality of a text, I believe, reinforce habits that make students attentive readers of its narrative. One of the great advantages of programs such as Oxygen is that their output can be easily converted into files read on mainstream eReaders (i.e., Kindle, etc) or for online display with minimal, and easily trained, front-end coding knowledge (i.e., html, css, javascript). In a digital humanities course, I would love to expand on an archival assignment used in previous courses that dealt with letters written by nineteenth-century women who migrated to Lowell to work in the textile mills. In earlier iterations, the letters served as a means of introducing concepts of primary sources with a research project; in a digital humanities course, this would also include a focus on how to make archival materials digitally accessible through the tools discussed in this handout. In introductory-level courses not focused on the digital humanities, I scaffold assignments to meet the needs of students possessing low-comfort levels with technologies. The examples on this page are of student research using Special Collections material with the online form created using only Wordpress and Mircosoft Word. In a more advanced digital humanities course focused on scholarly editing, there would be a greater emphasis on best practices for creating digital editions. In addition to focusing on creating and implementing a coding schema, there would be three main outputs of students’ final projects: 1) an online, multimedia manuscript on an open-source platform such as Scalar, 2) an eBook edition that can be easily and freely distributed, and 3) a physical print edition, using either local printing resources or a platform such as PressBooks, which specializing in anthologizing digital sources into print-friendly forms.
!
! ! Kugler,!Emily!MN!/!MLA!Handout,!Page 4 of 4!