Congrats, Jana! This is such exciting news. Everyone in the Lab is looking forward to learning more from your work during the next few years.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the AABrown project, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of the forthcoming Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit.

From the MLab team, Adèle Barclay, Nina Belojevic, Alex Christie, Jana Millar Usiskin, Stephen Ross, Jentery Sayers, and Katie Tanigawa will be presenting at Congress 2013. Hope to see you there!

Throughout Congress 2013

“The Long Now of Ulysses: Curating literature after the Internet” | Maltwood Gallery, McPherson Library

How are interpretations of literature changing in a digital age? This student-curated exhibit engages that very question using James Joyce’s Ulysses as its tutor text with an emphasis on time, place, computation, and speculation. Audiences are invited to interact with many of the curated materials. Learn more about the exhibit.

Monday, 3 June 2013

“Research for a Better Life: The Storytellers Showcase” | 13:00 | SSHRC | McKinnon Gym, Expo Event Space | #sshrcstorytellers

The Top 25 Storytellers take the stage! With its Research for a Better Life competition, SSHRC challenged postsecondary students to show how research in the social sciences and humanities is helping us understand and improve the world around us, today and into the future. With submissions from across the country, Canada’s students met the challenge with enthusiasm, creativity and wit. Now we invite you to join the audience as the Top 25 finalists share their work in a spotlight showcase, with five winners earning an invitation to the World Social Science Forum in Montreal. Jury members include Shari Graydon, Jay Ingram, Antonia Maioni and Pierre Normand.

“A Linked Open Data Approach to the Study of Global Modernism” | 13:30 | CSDH/SCHN | SS / Mathematics A102 | #csdhschn2013
Stephen Ross (presenting author), Jentery Sayers, Adèle Barclay, and Alex Christie (presenting author)

Post by Jana Millar Usiskin, attached to the AABrown project, with the exhibits tag. Featured video for this post, documenting a walkthrough of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit, produced by Jana Millar Usiskin.

The Lab’s winning video, “Recovering the Local: A Digital Literary Exhibit on Audrey Alexandra Brown” (above) details the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit project, which is scheduled to launch this year. About that project, Jana Millar Usiskin says the following: “Women’s voices have historically been overlooked in a national context. It’s important to use new media to recover local women’s voices in order to reshape contemporary understanding of national history and culture.”

The winning “Research for a Better Life” videos were unveiled in a cascade from coast to coast, starting April 2 in Newfoundland and ending May 21 with the four University of Victoria videos ahead of Congress 2013 next month. UVic and Ryerson were the only universities with four winners each. During Congress 2013, the UVic students will join the other winners in an exclusive research communications workshop as well as a three-minute storytellers pitch at the heart of an expo event space. They will compete for an opportunity to travel to the international social sciences forum in Montreal this October. Read more about the students and their video projects in The Ring. To view their videos, visit www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/storytellers.

From the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit: a newspaper clipping featuring a head shot of Audrey Alexandra Brown with other Canadian authors. Image care of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Collection. Digitization by Jana Millar Usiskin.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the AABrown project, with the exhibits and news tags. Featured video for this post by Adele Barclay, Nina Belojevic, Alex Christie, Arthur Hain, Mikka Jacobsen,  Shaun Macpherson, Jana Millar Usiskin, and Katie Tanigawa.

R and G ask: Is the argument reified by the prototype contestable, defensible, and substantive?

On a technical level, showcasing images and audio housed in UVic Special Collections, and contextualizing these materials with a narrative, the Brown Exhibit argues that the purview of scholarly materials is in libraries. If scholars want to create credible work, then they need to include these kinds of resources, because resources in libraries will likely maintain appropriate metadata, including correct copyright information. In terms of narrative, the exhibit argues that materials should be grouped and showcased thematically. I’ve arranged images of Brown and her work into sections that speak to larger discussions in national literature, media studies, and women’s writing. Rather than arrange chronologically or by media type, methods that might be considered less subjective, I’ve foregrounded my own interpretation of the materials. The exhibit argues that the onus of interpretation falls on the arranger. It presumes that I have the authority and expertise necessary for scholarly interpretation.

R and G ask: Does the prototype have a recognizable position in the context of similar work, either in terms of concept or affordances?

Like the Deena Larsen collection among others, the Brown Exhibit considers archival remediation a necessary and valuable endeavor. Both projects enable online access to materials that may not otherwise be easily accessible. Both projects assume the importance of metadata and suggest that the information that contextualizes artifacts adds value to a visitor’s experience of that artifact.

R and G ask: Is the prototype part of a series of prototypes with an identifiable trajectory?

In the context of the Maker Lab, the Brown Exhibit is one of two Scalar books that are now being built to display remediated materials. Like the Crocodile Cafe Exhibit, the Brown Exhibit focuses on a very particular aspect of West Coast culture. Both value the local particularity of their subject matter and the ways culture is made through media. In a broader context, projects such as the Brown Women Writers Project and Orlando are also attempting to recover women writers in a digital environment. These projects all have the goal of bringing attention to the work of writers who have been historically overlooked or marginalized.

R and G ask: Does the prototype address possible objections?

I can see objections being raised about the need for material to be housed in the library. The time and effort argument as well as the metadata argument might be raised here. The first group would suggest that while it would be better for materials to come from the library, there are so many materials in need of remediation that it becomes difficult for librarians to keep pace with the growing demands of the scholarly community. The exhibit would argue that part of the value in digital work is in the affiliations that arise alongside the finished product. I hope that by including a narrative of process, by linking showcased objects to the library site, and by acknowledging librarians’ contributions, the exhibit will make this kind of claim. In terms of metadata standards, others might argue that standardized metadata, as required for library hosting, might not best represent all digital materials. The exhibit would argue, through the inclusion of narrative, that issues of classification not necessarily apparent in the library’s official metadata can be supplemented with additional narrative.

R and G ask: Is the prototype itself an original contribution to knowledge?

In foregrounding narrative as a way of organizing and showcasing remediated materials, the Brown Exhibit does make an original contribution to the field of scholarly exhibits. I see the exhibit functioning in parallel with the library. In one scenario, the materials can be accessed on the library’s CONTENTdm webpage; here visitors will have a simulated experience of archival serendipity. They can construct their own narratives, and make their own arguments about the work. However, with the Brown Exhibit, they also have the option of encountering the material as you might in a museum or art gallery, with additional interpretation based on another’s research interests. I think this second kind of encounter is more likely to start discussion; visitors can engage with the material in an unexpected context and they might have points on which they disagree. Galey and Ruecker point out, there is a way of interpreting artifacts such that they become ‘productively contestable.’ In other words, we are more likely to talk about materials when someone starts the discussion. So the exhibit argues that before digital remediation can have an impact, someone needs to do the work of interpretation.

Galey, Alan and Stan Ruecker. “How a Prototype Argues.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25.4 (2010): 405-424. Oxford Journals. Web. 23 March 2013.

Post by Jana Millar Usiskin, attached to the AABrown project, with the exhibits tag. Featured images for this post care of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit (built using the Scalar platform) and Literary and Linguistic Computing, at llc.oxfordjournals.org.

Post by Jana Millar Usiskin, attached to the AABrown project, with the exhibits tag. Featured video for this post, documenting a walk through the use of the Scalar platform, produced by Jana Millar Usiskin.

Bordalejo’s questions are particularly relevant in the digital humanities. A recent workshop facilitated by the University of Victoria library, entitled “Why the Library Won’t Archive Your Digital Project,” listed a set of topics that included items like “What criteria is used?”; “Does the department cost share on the project?”; and “When does the library take on a project?” Factors that impede the process of institutional preservation include issues of consistent metadata (information that describes an image, text, audio recording, or object to enable preservation and discovery), copyright issues, and structural costs. At present, the UVic Library is planning to create a set of standards by which both librarians and students will have a better understanding of what is required in order to archive digital work. Perhaps at odds with the institutional impulse to standardize is the increasing drive to make scholarship accessible and relevant to the public, in which case scholarly work, especially archival work, begins to compete in a market of both the old-made-new and the new-made-old.

Audrey Alexandra Brown, the poet and writer whose material I am now translating into a digital medium, consistently produced the new-made-old, anticipating, in a sense, today’s Instagram users. She wrote weekly newspaper poems for a mass audience. Her themes and style recalled nineteenth-century romanticism at a time when increased industrialization, communication, and global conflict was transforming the way literature was conceived of, produced, and marketed. In my exhibit of Brown’s work, how can I draw attention to the similarities between Brown’s antimodern impulse and the cultural impetus to produce the new-made-old, between Brown’s sentimentality and our own nostalgic moment? How can I best explore the cultural and social implications of this relationship?

Post by Jana Millar Usiskin, attached to the AABrown project, with the exhibits tag. Featured images for this post care of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Collection at UVic. Digitization by Jana Millar Usiskin.

While I had undertaken some of the digitization for a digital humanities seminar (with Jentery Sayers) last semester, a meeting with the UVic librarians earlier this month made me realize how much space I need for storage as well as how much metadata work is yet to be done on the exhibit. We discussed various options for both these issues. Basically, the past few months have been preoccupied with questions of storage and discoverability. Where can I house this material so that it remains stable and searchable? What digitization process must I follow in order to ensure that Brown’s remediated archival material is qualified for these storage spaces? What metadata needs to accompany this material, and how will it map on to the library’s system?

In meetings with Chris Petter and Corey Davis, we decided that the best way of housing the materials so that I would also have permanent URLs for the data, was through CONTENTdm, a system already used by the library for much of its digital material. CONTENTdm uses the Dublin Core ontology to attach metadata to images, audio, and text materials, which can then be searched through WorldCat and thus made available to a larger scholarly community. In meetings with Nancy Stuart and Gail Fowler, we established the criteria I could follow for the metadata, including which fields to use and how to format the information. These criteria have guided me as I more precisely document the materials I’ve scanned so that they can be uploaded into the library system. Due to time constraints, I will be unable to digitize all the material in the Brown fonds, so my questions at this time pertain to exigency. What materials most need to be digitized at this historical moment? What kinds of stories can this archive tell?

Post by Jana Millar Usiskin, attached to the AABrown project, with the exhibits tag. Featured images for this post care of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Collection at UVic. Digitization by Jana Millar Usiskin.

Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

The research lead for the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit is Jana Millar Usiskin. Development of the exhibit (2012-14) was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the MLab, the Modernist Versions Project, and the University of Victoria Library. Preliminary research (2011-12) was supported by Editing Modernism in Canada. Jana Millar Usiskin is the sole author and editor of the exhibit. She also digitized and structured the Audrey Alexandra Brown fonds at UVic. The Audrey Alexandra Brown Collection is housed in CONTENTdm, and the corresponding exhibit (yet to be published) was built in Scalar.

Project Status

Stored on the MLab’s Scalar build, the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit was actively developed between 2012 and 2014. During that period, Jana Millar Usiskin gave several talks on the project, including talks at UVic and Simon Fraser University. She is now overseeing the exhibit and its direction.

From the exhibit: a newspaper clipping featuring a head shot of Audrey Alexandra Brown with other Canadian authors. Image care of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Collection. Digitization by Jana Millar Usiskin.

Post by Stephen Ross, attached to the AABrown project, with the projects and exhibits tags. Featured image for this post by Jana Millar Usiskin, care of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)