 Hi everybody, thanks for coming to our Digital Matters Research Talks, our long delay, long postpone research talks from spring 2020, pre-pandemic, if you can remember that time. My name is David Rowe. I'm the Director of Digital Matters and I'm joined today by the Digital Matters Librarian Rebecca Cummings and two of our grad fellows and two of our faculty fellows. What we're going to do is I'm going to introduce everyone right from the start and then we're just going to roll into it. Each fellow and grantee has about 10 minutes to give an overview of the research and what they've been working on. And then we're going to take questions or have sort of a conversation at the end. If that sounds good to everybody, I will get going. First up is Megan Weiss, who is pursuing an NMA in US history with a public history certificate. Her area of interest is Utah Pioneer History and is intersections with race, gender, material, culture. Her project is 3D printing Utah's material history. After that, we'll have Jeff Turner. He is a PhD candidate in US history. He studies immigration history, American religious history, digital humanities and the history of the American West. His dissertation compares the migration experiences of Mormons, Muslims and Sikhs who migrated to the US between 1891 and 1924. And he's going to be talking about Native Places Atlas project, mapping native Utah. Next, we have our faculty grantee, Aislin McDougal. She is a visiting assistant professor of digital humanities in the Department of English. Her research addresses the content-based, formal and material infiltrations of digital tech on North American fiction and narrative. And she's going to be talking about reflections of Banks Island, negotiating sovereignty and community via the colonial digital mapping strategies. And finally, bringing up the rear is Carlos Santana, another group faculty grantee. He's a philosopher of science, whose work is as a consulting conceptual engineer to the environmental sciences. Carlos, you have to explain what that means to me. He's written and presented about a range of key scientific concepts from biodiversity to Anthropocene to novel ecosystem. And his project is who's Anthropocene. So thank you for joining us again. First up, we will have Megan Weiss and David. Do you mind if I say one quick thing? Sure, we are going to hold questions until the end. But if you have a question that pops up as people are speaking, feel free to add that to the chat box and we'll get to that as soon as we're done with all the presentations. So I should have probably said that prior, but it's good. Now we have everyone here. So feel free to add your questions or just hold them until the end. OK, thanks, Megan, are you unmuted? Yeah, I'm going to start sharing my screen. All right. All right. Can everybody see it? OK. So hi, everyone. Thank you so much, Rebecca and David for putting this together and having me come speak and for this awesome opportunity. So my name is Megan. I was the spring 2020 fellow and like David said, my project is about 3D printing, Utah's material history, heritage, hyper ownership in museums and classrooms. So before I get into this idea of heritage, hyper ownership, I thought I would explain a bit my interest in material culture and material history and kind of why I applied to digital matters. So material culture is definitely a super hot topic in a lot of humanity's fields right now. It's becoming more and more legitimate as a primary source material for historians. It kind of has its origins in art history. So one art historian named Jules Pram talked about how objects are unconscious expressions of cultural values and beliefs. If you're familiar with material culture, you probably have heard of Marcel Maus, who is an anthropologist who studied gift giving in Pacific Islander communities. And he kind of triggered this ontological turn of anthropology where anthropologists became interested in other ways of experiencing the world and other ways of knowing. There's also Bruno Latour. He is all about actor network theory, if you've heard of it. The material is a very big part of that. So that's kind of the academic background of material culture, why I'm interested in it. But the reason why I applied to digital matters actually began with a conference held by the Conference of Inner Mountain Archivists and Utah Manuscripts Association. They put together this primary source literacy conference where it's for teachers and educators who work with primary source material in the classroom. And it was last October and during one of the presentations, a group of teachers from the Salt Lake City School District talked about how they have writing and they have photographs as primary source material, but there wasn't a lot of material culture or three-dimensional objects. So I had the crazy idea to make that happen and apply to digital matters so that I could 3D scan and 3D print objects from Utah's history. So in terms of the 3D scanning, I was able to work with TJ and the Chris staff to play with a bunch of different approaches. So we worked with the Artex Space Spider that the Marriott Library has and that was like best of the best, super high tech, super high quality scanner, but we also played around with an Xbox Kinect and iPhones, things that anybody would have. And the reason why I approached it like this was so that I could get a wide variety of approaches for different museums on different budget restrictions. So if you're here and you work in a museum and you want to know more about that, I'm happy to share. But as we went about our scanning process, we definitely ran into some issues. So these are pictures from the Natural History Museum of Utah. And on the left, you'll see I was scanning a coil pot and I wasn't aligning the capture in real time. So I had to do it manually later, which was very impureating. Some objects weren't scannable, like a husket point that's made of like an amber, or not amber agate, it just like went right through it. So there were definitely a lot of issues that we learned about, and I don't know, TJ, if you'll agree, but I think that this was actually really great because we learned about different settings, different approaches for scanning, that will be really beneficial for the Marriott in the future as they use this Artex Space Spider with other museums. We kind of learned how to streamline the back end of it. But yes, definitely a learning curve. Same goes for 3D printing. It was definitely a variety of results. So on the left, you'll see I scanned a historic column at the Utah State Historical Society that was taken off of the governor's mansion on South Temple. And on the left, I scanned it with Xbox Connect and it printed kind of wonky and unstable. And on the right with the Artex Space Spider and it made a really nice crisp print. So different scans made for different prints. We played with size, surface texture. I've seen other artists play with taking a 3D print and casting it into a ceramic mold so that you can have a clay version that's a bit heavier or more, it represents better the historic material, things like that. But the most important thing for me was how can I make this something that's interesting for a middle schooler or a high schooler that's learning about Utah history and how can I translate its material reality in a way that's meaningful for them that they can learn something from it. So the second part of my project was I kind of teamed up with Jeff Strieba who's a teacher at Hillside Middle School and he runs a 3D printing lab. So what we had kind of worked out is that students would take my scans off of Thingiverse or my manufacturer and they would 3D print them for their Utah history class and get extra credit. And the Utah history teacher was stoked about this but unfortunately it was right around this time that COVID hit so we weren't able to roll that out in a classroom setting. My intention was to kind of lurk and just see if it was a meaningful experience for the students and just kind of see what happens but like I said, that was not, that did not come to fruition. But fortunately my scans are online. So if you look up Utah history on Thingiverse or my manufacturer, they are there for anyone. And so that's there and hopefully the connection can kind of be made again once schools open up and once Jeff is 3D printing again. But even, so even though this part of my project was kind of cut short a little bit, I was still able to play with like the theoretical, idea of what happens when you take a material object and 3D scan it and put it online for anyone to use. Like what's happening there? What's the relationship between the history and the person and what does it mean for digital heritage preservation more generally. So something that helped me think about this is this concept of hyper ownership that I learned about in a Journal of Law and Technology. This article by Charles Cronin, possession is 99% of the law 3D printing public domain cultural artifacts and copyright. He doesn't coin the term hyper ownership, but he talks about how 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies enable us to free cultural works from the physical materials in which they were originally embodied. Marvel, wood, et cetera, and convert them into primarily works of information. So something that kind of helped me conceptualize what this means is he talks about a symphony and how you can go to an archive and you can see the original Beethoven sheet music and you can see the original markings on it. But if you go home and you consume that same symphony through headphones on your iPod, you're still engaging with the culture of it with it as a work of information, but it's just translated to you in a different way. So on the right, you'll see a carbide lamp from Elta, Utah, which used to be a silver mine. Now it's a ski resort. And that is an entry on the Utah State Historical Society artifact database. And there you can access its material, its dimensions, its historical context, its provenance information. And that is making accessible to the public. The artifact is a work of information. And for my project 3D printing and making a 3D scan of something was just sort of an extension of that process so that you can hold it in your hand and you can see how it would have related to the human body in physical space. So kind of fun to think about. The idea here is that it's not replacing the original artifact, but it's emphasizing its helpful material reality. So something that was also helpful to think about is Walter Benjamin's the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. He talks about how historic works have this aura that's like it represents its time and space and everything it's been through. As an object. And if you replicate it, you can never capture that. But he also kind of mentions the Mona Lisa and how when you replicate something hundreds of thousands of times, you're just making it more famous and you're compounding its original material reality by making it more widely distributed as a heritage item. That's kind of where I went with this. And the other thing I wanted to share is the Scan the World website where I uploaded my objects. They kind of have a crowdsourced database of 3D scan museum objects from all over the world. And they talk about how an object on Scan the World doesn't and shouldn't have one specific owner. The object is the nucleus of the narrative with all contributors and original owners of it giving equal ownership according to their part in the object story. So while museums are responsible for the care and preservation of these items, they do that for the public and having 3D scanning and printing technologies just kind of offers another way for the public to meaningfully engage with those material objects in real time. So it was a really fun project. I hope that wasn't too much of an overload of information. Before I wrap up, I did want to thank TJ and the Chris staff because they made this project possible and thanks to Digital Matters and all of these awesome museums who let me come in and scan their stuff. Thank you so much. Thank you, Megan. Jeff, I'm going to ask you to unmute now. Cool. Can you hear me? Good. Sweet. Okay. Then I'll get rolling. I'll share my screen in a quick second. First, my name is Jeff. I'm a PhD student. This project that I worked on was a co-joint vision from Digital Matters and the American West Center. And I'm going to pitch you the vision of the project first and then show you my shortcomings in making it. And hopefully you can see what the end game will be with John's tenure this year. So here we go. Humans are a storytelling people. The kinds of stories we tell very widely depending on the content, time, teller and listener. Some stories are personal. Some lay out a series of facts in a linear way hoping to show cause and effect. Some compare unlikely narratives. Some explore entangled webs of interaction and some show change over time. But all stories are packaged. Humans tell all stories within time and within place. And humans portray stories in different kinds of media for a story's meaning, time, place and medium matter. The project that I worked on for Digital Matters in the American West Center depends on the stories packaged within names. And hopefully this is the version that I've got. More often than not, at least in Utah, the names of places that you see on your GPS when you drive in your car carry cultures of settler colonialism. They display anglicized words that ultimately erase the names that the indigenous describe to different geographies and thereby ignore indigenous cultures of place making. Native places Atlas pushes against this colonialist impulse and provides a digital map that displays indigenous names for places like that. But what's in a name? Names carry the vestiges of the context which give them birth. Names act as hermeneutical spectacles through which we in the present try to see humanity in the past. Names can help us see or can help hide different structures, agents, processes, faces and voices that make up the stuff of the stories we tell about other times and other places. And ultimately the stories we tell about ourselves. Anthropologist Keith Basso who studied Western Apache Place Names has written quote, whenever the members of the community speak about their landscape, whenever they name it or classify it or tell stories about it, they unsinkingly represent it in ways that are compatible with shared understandings of how in the fullest sense, they know themselves to occupy it. Places and their meanings are continually woven into the fabric of social life, anchoring it to features of the landscape and blanketing it with layers of significance that few can fail to appreciate. End quote. Names then carry stories of the people who utter them and indigenous place names make visible landscapes, cultures of place and ways of interacting with the past that are according to Basso, brimming with past and present significance. This is a scope of engagement with place and past and culture that Native Places Atlas strives to accommodate. But media matters for meaning making. Native Places Atlas uses a digital map in order to harbor these place names and eventually an interactive repository for culture and heritage. The medium of a digital map demands that scholars confront the technique or praxis of the technologically complicated lives in which users exist. One writer, commonly known as the hacker Hanming Wei, I can only dream of having such a cool nickname one day, has said, the word in the end is the only system of encoding thoughts, the only medium that is not fungible that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media. The words of place names then make the heart of the project, without which it would be nothing. And hopefully in ways that do not make fungible and dissolvable, the meanings that these place names carry. But technology can muddy that connection between past and present, can hide the stories that names bear, and can impose different meanings for the ways that users think of history. Digital humanist Alan Lu describes a new technological historicism in the 21st century. He writes, quote, it is history itself, and I would say Western history, but that's not what he writes. It is history itself that incessantly loosens people from their land, ancestors, nation, and so on to make them look away from, yet hunger for, the haunted connectivity, that is the sense of history in the first place, end quote. If the word is the meaning that survives the torrent of electronic media, and if Western history with its pure beginnings and instantaneous endings detaches people from the connectivity with land and belonging, then place names provide a unique opportunity for a digital project that seeks to root itself within the practice of what Basso calls speaking with names. Indigenous place names provide a different way of practicing history, one in which Indigenous names foster engagement, interaction, the imagining of possible worlds, and maybe something like a Heideggerian concept of dwelling, but maybe we don't have to go that far. The hope of native places Atlas then, in the end, is to invoke modes of interaction and naming that demonstrate the ways in which wisdom sits in places. Maybe you don't expect to see all of that from my contributions to the project that I'm sharing with you today. I'm not that good at coding, but that's the vision. In all seriousness, native places Atlas involved a bunch of technological choices, and the current stage of the project relies on three open source pieces that contribute to the digital map, Mukadu leaflets and a MySQL database. I'll walk through each of them now, talk about some pitfalls and successes, and then end with where the project might go in the future, and I'm happy to answer any questions at the end, at the end of everyone. So to start with Mukadu, which you can see sort of housed here, is a content management system that currently lives within a Drupal 7 atmosphere, which for me meant learning a PHP a little bit. Washington State University designed Mukadu specifically for Indigenous digital projects. Some of the ways that this mission manifests within Mukadu are the ways in which cultural heritage items can have controlled access that's specific to particular communities, the different forms of metadata collection and types of digital archival material, and its commitment to being open source. Mukadu also has a plugin with Reclaim Hosting, which is an education-oriented hosting service that houses the domain and database for the project. For native places Atlas, Mukadu seems like a perfect fit for the future of the project with an ethically oriented plan of community engagement. Developers at Wazoo are currently planning on releasing the next version of Mukadu with the future release of Drupal 9 next year. We'll see what that actually looks like. But in the meantime, we've created a module within the current version that contains the features of the map that we needed to display. One of the major obstacles of using Mukadu came from my inexperience with PHP and trying to get our module to communicate correctly with the database on the back end of the site. Thankfully, Stack Overflow exists. And also thankfully, I have a brother who helped me troubleshoot lots of things. Nevertheless, Mukadu gives a unique set of possibilities for the future of native places Atlas, from housing stories narrated by indigenous peoples, to digital representations of material culture, to expansive forms of community engagement, to means of protecting cultural heritage. The visualization of the map itself runs on leaflets, which is a compact and open source JavaScripts library for map visualization. Hopefully I can pull it up. This is what the actual JavaScript file looks like without really helpful color coding, which you can find in my coding software. If I get to brag a little, there are some cool things that I wanna point out from learning about how to write the JavaScript part of this project. One of the challenges for developing the functionality of the map was to think about usability and data management in the current iteration of the project and for the future potential scopes of the project. As it grows in terms of data, as more place names are added and maybe other kinds of data are incorporated, it becomes harder and slower to load that data upfront when a user loads the site. Also, side note and guilty confession, in the first iteration of pulling data from the database, I somehow managed to create a ballooning webpage that continually pulled data from the back end, which I imagine is a great way to try and make devices catch fire. So for the future scope of the project and to prevent very angry people and technology on fire, we use the map's bounding box as a way to limit what data loads upfront. So the bounding box refers to just this portion of the actual visualization of the map. When a user interacts with the map by moving the center of the map or changing zoom or something, then the map will asynchronously load more data from the database while also running a check of the data that the map has already loaded. And here's the cool part. Again, find it. Yeah, there we go. In order to do this, I had to use math from the 19th century, which I think is really funny to sort of put into code. There's just something weirdly historical about it. And behold, let me show you the haversine formula. This formula helps calculate a radius from the center point of the bounding box to its edges so that the data can find latitudes and longitudes of data within that radius. Thank you, old 19th century mathematicians. Lastly, the project stores data within a MySQL database. This is the table that houses the data. That database lives within Reclaim Hosting. Since Reclaim Hosting only offers MySQL as a database kind for support, it limited the ways that we could store data. But that's okay. What seemed the most economical and the most practical in terms of workflow for different parts of the project was to store a few important identifying parts of each place name, ID, latitude, longitude, and then the rest we store in this giant string that we call data. The string that's called data includes GeoJSON coordinates for polygons and polylines. And it's actually the JavaScript on the front end that then parses the string of data into JSON data and makes variables for each field that's used in the visualization. Or in the visualization. One of the perks for this approach is that these kinds of data are dynamically expandable since all data will be stringed and then parsed anyway. The future of the project, if you wanted to add different kinds of categories for place names, you could. You just add a column and then it will be stringed and then it'll be parsed and you create a new variable and that's that, then you use it. I think that future iterations though, and this is for you, John, will want to think through speed and efficiency for storing and accessing different kinds of data like audio files or images. Overall, my work on the project hopefully helps create some of the bones that John, this year's Digital Matters Fellow and American West Center Fellow can use. I think future iterations might flush out the site of the project more, develop aesthetic parts, incorporate different kinds of data for place names like a name's pronunciation or an associated story or image or artifact and foster communal engagement by thinking through means of interaction. That's what I've got. Thanks for being here and thanks for listening. Hey, thank you so much, Jeff. Okay, and stop screen sharing. Aislin, I'm going to go ahead and unmute you. Hello. Thank you. I'm going to jump right in and just start screen sharing. Okay, so I have a bit of a title change and it's actually in keeping with some of the concepts that Jeff's been discussing today. My project is Reflections of Ika Hook, Negotiating Sovereignty and Community in the 1953 Sax Harbor RCMP Detachment. So I want to begin by acknowledging that I'm speaking from my home in Saskatchewan, Canada, which is predominantly treaty for territory and it's home to the Cree, Soto, Nakoda, Lakota and Dakota peoples and it's the homeland of the Métis peoples. I'm going to just jump in with some backstory because my project has a lot of moving parts and I realized as I was preparing it's really hard to explain from scratch. So in 1953, the RCMP, which is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, sent my grandfather, Daniel McDougal, who is a constable with the RCMP up to Ika Hook to build a prefabricated RCMP detachment, which you can see in the photo here. Ika Hook is also known as Sax Harbor Banks Island in the Northwest Territories, Canada. The building of this attachment has been associated with the colonizing experiments of the Hierctic Relocation, which was a really terrible movement that involved moving Inuit communities to extremely northern areas of Canada to fulfill a sovereignty objective. So at the same time as the detachment has been associated with these sovereignty experiments, Ika Hook had already been inhabited seasonally by an established community of Inuit trappers led by Fred Carpenter since about the 1930s. So my grandfather during his time there took over a hundred photographs and these are actually just a fraction of a larger collection of photographs from other locations in the Arctic that many of which have never been shown outside my family and many of which depict his time with the communities that he lived with. So the photographs are replete with fascinating and complex contradictions. My grandfather literally built a police station on indigenous land, yet he takes these seemingly joyous photographs of him living and working with community members. So my project is really driven by this complex coexistence of sovereignty and community and I think that's really, really fascinating in thinking about reconciliation even in non-digital and digital contexts. So like I said, the photographs have really remained unseen. They've been in my family's attic since my grandfather's death in 1976. And so in addition to them being unseen, most of these photographs depict local individuals and many of those people are unnamed. I have no idea who they are or what their stories are. So a huge part of this project is actually repatriating those photographs and giving them back to the community. And I strive to do that in three different ways, one of which I'm sure we can all guess is impossible given COVID-19, but I'll talk about these three ways today. So first I was supposed to travel to the community and I'd been in contact with a couple elders who'd agreed to sit down with me and look through the photographs and help me to identify individuals, any locations that I might have incorrect and talk about any stories or contexts for these photographs. The second and third I was able to do even if just in a basic way. Photographic exhibit, I was able to preserve the original slides with the help of Michelle Golahan in the digital, she's the digital operations coordinator at the Marriott Library and she was exceptional in helping me take the original slides and preserve them in high quality digital form. And it was mostly so that the photos could be accessible and ready to be used in any sort of digital environments. And then the third is an interactive digital map. So with the help of Justin Sorenson in GIS services, we were able to create an interactive digital map of the area that invites individuals from the community to further contextualize, add to annotate the photographs. So this is something that I hope to continue moving forward. So like I mentioned, obviously the community outreach was impossible. I was supposed to travel in June, but that unfortunately couldn't happen. And that would have been not only impossible but absolutely irresponsible. I'm not sure if many are familiar with Canada's egregious history of propulsively giving disease-laden blankets to indigenous communities. I'm in these sort of acts of shrouded genocide. So I think that just thinking about that and thinking about traveling during the COVID pandemic is just, it would have been an absolutely terrible situation. So I'm hoping to travel next summer to complete the project in that regard. But for now, my project's kind of taken a turn from the practical to the theoretical or methodological. So I'm hoping that that can kind of show through today. So when I couldn't make that trip, this is kind of where things got a little bit more methodological. And when I turned to the photographic exhibit, one of the first things that I wanted to think about was the question, what does it mean when a settler photographs indigenous peoples in this way? So I can actually, I'm gonna switch my screen share really quick. Sorry, this is sort of cumbersome. I'm just gonna show you. The Omeca site that I was able to put together. And this is the gallery. This is kind of what the exhibit looks like so far. So a lot of the photos have some information. A lot of them don't. And that's kind of what's exciting about moving forward with this project. So one of the things that I come to, oh my goodness, sorry, just a second, I'm just losing this. I'm really sorry, my options for screen share have completely changed and my PowerPoint's gone. There it is. Basically Turtle Island has a long history of settlers depicting indigenous peoples through various media and curating in doing so stereotypical images of these communities. So one of the things that I came across and thinking through the methodology for making a digital exhibit of these photographs was the colonial gaze. And so this is something that Anishinaabe scholar Sandra Spears defines as a point of view that contains all of the beliefs and stories that constitute a certain mythology about a community or individual. And then this kind of view projects things only in the way that settlers perceive the world. And part of that perception is thinking specifically about the way the colonizer can be kind of confirmed as having a confirmed place in that world. It's actually kind of akin to the male gaze if you're familiar with that, but just sort of thinking it through in those different ways. Saskatchewan writer Paul C. Sequasas describes something really similar in his book, Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun. And this is a really amazing project that came out last year in Canada. And it features archival photos of indigenous peoples that he has posted on social media, gained a following and gathered names, locations and stories for. So this whole book just works through hundreds of these amazing photos and contextualizes them. And in this project, he talks about the complexity of settler photographers possessing their indigenous subjects, yet he also complicates the colonial gaze by talking about settler photographers as individuals who can become embedded in a community long enough such that their lenses become unobtrusive or not as obtrusive as a tourist. So the photographs that I'm working with are obviously in no way exempt from participating in the colonial gaze. And then at the same time, I do think that they do reflect an unobtrusive lens of someone who had become integrated in a community. So this coexistence of the colonial gaze and the unobtrusive lens makes for that tension that I'm really interested in between sovereignty and community. So one of the examples I use on my Omega side and I'm not gonna switch back to it because that was way too cumbersome to switch back. We'll switch back at the end to view my map. Is this photo, and there's many photos taken on what was Dominion Day, which is we know it now in Canada as Canada Day. So if you're not familiar with that would be, it's the same as the 4th of July. So in recent years in Canada, there are a lot of discussions about this being really a celebration of anniversary after anniversary of indigenous genocide. And rightly so. So it's a very fraught topic in Canada and we're having productive conversations about that. So when I look at this photo, we can look at this and notice a couple different things that are very lovely. Everyone's smiling, they're eating donuts, they're sharing pie, the people from the community are together. There are fox pelts, which would be indicative of really successful trapping season. And this island specifically was known for its arctic fox hunting. But without any sort of grounded context, like this is just sort of perception, right? And without this, any context, the image that I'm creating here of a perceived communal gathering really risks becoming mythologized in a way that satiates a really colonial appetite for this settler indigenous bliss. So that's something I'm really interested in in looking at these photos. So then the colonial gaze, the way I see it functions in two ways. First, it's obviously my grandfather as a settler taking photographs of indigenous subjects. But second, it's me as a settler scholar looking at the photos and kind of consuming them in that way. So it's functioning on those two different levels. On the other hand, we can look at this photo from a different, more critical perspective. And we can look at it in a way that details the ways that that colonial gaze is challenged. So this is Dominion Day. It's July 1st, 1954. You can see my grandfather wearing pants with a yellow stripe, which is famous, like that's what the RCMP wear even to this day. The Union Jack is literally staked into the land, right? So there's all of these different ways that we can read this and complicate that sort of blissful idea of community in favor of looking more critically at the ways that these pictures remind us of sovereignty objectives. So my question becomes, how does this tension between sovereignty and community, how does this relate back to my DH work? So for me, it's through identifying those tensions within the photographs themselves that led me to think through what a digital map could do and what a digital map could do in terms of being a possible way for decolonizing the photographs, the narratives and the histories. So there are two things with these photographs that I think are important. First and foremost is the identities of the individuals depicted. And the second would be the context, the stories. I can sit and tell you what I think about that photo all day, but I don't know anything about that story. I don't know anything about that day. I'm just trying to close read it using my best English professor skills. So Paul C. Sequasus insists on using social media for his outreach, but for this project, I'm pretty adamant that I want to privilege in-person community outreach. And that's for a number of reasons, but the most important is that I am a settler scholar. So I feel strongly that requesting attention time and especially information from community members and elders specifically through a more impersonal medium like email or social media correspondence would risk re-enacting a settler indigenous exchange wherein myself as settler benefits from a sort of taking. So while I'm interested in gathering information, obviously I think what has become evident to me is that the most important thing is repatriation of these photos in whatever form that would take. So how can that be a possibility? There's a similar project that I've screenshot here that I've come across in my research called Views from the North. And this is a project where a scholar named Carol Payne has had Inuit youth travel north to meet with elders and talk about photographs. So similar to what I'm aiming to do. And then this map kind of charts any of that information. But one of the methodologies that she uses is called visual repatriation, which is something that I think is really, really helpful in thinking about how I wanna move forward with my map. So she defines this as the recovery and reclamation of visual or material culture made by or depicting indigenous peoples undertaken by the same indigenous groups or in collaboration with outside researchers. And one of the coolest things about this idea is that she furthers this by saying the best visual repatriation work, make sure that the groups of people who are depicted in the photographs are the ones who do the reclaiming and then re-narrating of the images. And she insists that the non-academic researcher take a role of facilitator or collaborator rather than sort of dictator of the project. And this is just so that the archive can be seen as a flexible tool that can be shaped by the indigenous viewer particularly. And this is a huge reason as to why I think in-person community outreach and community outreach at all is important to the kind of project that I'm working on. And one of the interesting things about her visual repatriation is it accompanies another outlook that she takes with cybercardographic mapping. So she argues this kind of mapping enables a collaborative nature that is essential for the kind of community outreach that she's doing and that I'm hoping to do down the road. So again, my project is working with similar methodologies and again with a constant help of Justin Sorensen who's here today and I cannot thank you enough because this was so new to me to use GIS. But it was really, really fun to work with him on that. We were able to create a digital map that I'm gonna show you in about a minute. That's quite akin to paying cybercardography as a collaborative avenue for visual repatriation. So one of the things though that she doesn't really acknowledge in views from the North is the question of whether or not digital mapping actually can decolonize what is already a very colonial practice mapping. Could it decolonize mapping or does it actually just rehearse colonial violence in a new medium? I think it's safe to say that cartography has obvious roots in colonial violence and it remains persistent, but can we decolonize the map? My simple answer is yes, but that's not again without acknowledging the obvious tension between sovereignty and community. It's not very cut and dried. So one of the things I've been thinking about is indigenous mapping, which is a kind of counter mapping. And this comes from Dallas Hunt and Sean Stevenson who define indigenous mapping as that which counters Eurocentric cartography in a way that indigenous peoples articulate their presence on and their right to defend their ancestral lands. So there's been work that explores indigenous mapping in non-cardographic terms though as well. So there's land-based mapping, but there's other ways that indigenous communities map. And some of those include carving trees or sewing wampum belts, sharing oral stories. One of the most important aspects in the end of this kind of mapping is that individual indigenous nations determine how their mapping is to be conceptualized on their own terms. So just to end, and then I'll show you the map. I promise, I'm sorry, this is long wind. Indigenous mapping is inherently digital. Digital technologies can be crucial in the emergence of some forms of indigenous mapping. So Thomas McGurk and Sebastian Cacar suggest that digital technologies can mobilize indigenous control over processes and content in mapping projects and open new possibilities for stories to be told, geo-located and shared, awarding the power to indigenous groups and individuals to control these stories and share them broadly. Ultimately, it would be irresponsible to suggest that my project is entirely decolonial because this suggestion would only solidify a really egregious oversimplification of the decolonizing potential of digital tools. My project does run the risk of rehearsing the settler imagination, definitely. But ultimately, digital tools are, I think, complicated by this tension between their ability to be used for decolonial effort and their simultaneous limitations as mere digital sites for settler colonial control. So in my project, I do think that the digital technology tools open up cartography to decolonial possibility, but not without thinking through that. So if visual repatriation is achieved when it is shaped by the indigenous viewer then I think the same can be said for the map and that's why collaboration has been so key in moving forward with this map. According to Hanson Stevenson, it's the absence within maps that actually opens up possibilities for resisting geographies of power so that remapping the landscape on other terms can become possible and that's the aim of my project. The map includes data in the images or what little information I've been able to gather about those images, but it has blanks or openings and those blanks open up the possibility for community members to map Icahook in their own terms, in their own ways. So with this, it seeks to privilege indigenous modes of mapping, whether that be oral stories, place names, identities and it aims to eschew the static nature of the traditional Eurocentric map, if that makes sense. So I'm gonna show you the map and we actually made two versions of the map. This is version two, whoops, this is version two and so how it would work, you'll see four points on the map and this is because we were actually able to find the exact locations of some of the photos and I discussed this at length with Justin, he said if I were able to make the trip, I would have been able to edit our spreadsheet in real time on foot, if I were able to go to different locations and discover new locations for the photographs. So as it stands, you can click on any of these points and it'll show you the images. Whoops, I'm gonna refresh that, that's not the right image. There we go, that's better. So these photos here, it'll show you there's 93 different photos that I've attributed to this particular location and what this location is, the general location of the community, these are kind of unclassified in that sense. I don't know where many of them take place but some of these are a little more specific. So these 16 photos here are actually, I've confirmed, so to speak, I think I have to double confirm that these are taken inside the detachment. So these are all photos of the detachment or inside the detachment and this is based on cross referencing and just looking really closely at all the different angles and versions of these photographs. These photos here are of Fred Carpenter's cabin. So he was the first sort of the community leader who built this cabin in about 1930, I believe it was. And then these photos here are of the ships that were often docked on the side or on the shore. The big one is Fred Carpenter's ship, the North Star. The smaller one is a smaller ship called the Fox. So it's my hope that moving forward, I'll be able to give locations for some of the other photographs and then include more information. Are there stories? Are there identifiers for some of the people in the photos? The other map I'll show you just really quick is a little bit different in that if you click on the point, you can actually go to the gallery, which I've created. So I've created little galleries for each of the photos based on their location. So if you're interested in looking at the cabin, you can look specifically at photos of the cabin. And the final thing I'll say is the way we were able to find these locations is I was doing some research at the University of Calgary and one of their map specialists there was able to geo-reference a drawing, an old map from the 1950s of the community and overlay it on the current landscape to give me what are pretty close to the exact coordinates of some of the locations and buildings. So sorry for going so long with that. Thank you. I'm excited to discuss this afterwards with everyone. Rebecca, you're muted. Of course. I wanted to say thank you to Aislin and then thank you to everyone who's putting the great questions in the chat box. I am getting those ready in order, so we'll take those as soon as we're done with the presentations. So Carlos, I'm gonna go ahead and... I'm muted. Perfect, okay, take it away. Those are really cool projects on both those Indigenous mapping projects. I wish I had done that instead of doing a project about the end of the world as we know it, but here's a project I did. So the term Anthropocene, it's been used before, but it really has its academic genesis in this paper from Global Change Newsletter about 20 years ago. And even though the concept isn't old enough to legally buy a drink, it's really getting around. It has origins in the geosciences, but you see biologists and economists and social scientists and humanities scholars. I mean, even if you're like a classicist, you have to be talking about the Anthropocene now. So it's not just academics who have caught on to this concept, activists love talking about this trashiest of all epochs. And even in pop culture, you have things like this is Brian's recent album, Miss Anthropocene, which is admittedly a pretty lit album title, but before you give her too much credit, remember that this is someone who willingly chose to have a baby with Elon Musk. My point is everyone is using this term, but there's increasing recognition that what Anthropocene means to geologists is not what it means to people in the social sciences and humanities. And this is problematic because the whole idea behind the Anthropocene is it is the geological epoch when humans have become a geological force. That the Anthropocene is when we can't make a distinction between sort of the human sciences and the natural sciences anymore. And so if our study of the Anthropocene has split into a human sciences study and a natural sciences study, we're kind of failing to study the thing that the concept was meant to get us to do in the first place. Of course, what do people do in response to this? They argue for more collaboration between natural scientists and social scientists and humanists, but there hasn't been very much effective collaboration as many people including the quote I'm citing here have observed. And maybe part of the reason is because of this sort of fundamental difference in the concepts, including the concept of Anthropocene itself. So my project was the Corpus Linguistics Project. And what we did was we created three corpora looking at for the prospects of transdisciplinary cooperation studying the Anthropocene, using different analytic techniques to look at how the concept has bifurcated or trifurcated into multiple concepts in the different disciplines. We had three corpora of research about the Anthropocene from the different disciplines each about one and a half million words. And the first thing we looked for were keywords. Briefly and roughly, keywords are words that are distinctive of one corpus in contrast to another. So here are some of the top geoscience keywords in contrast with the humanities corpus. And some of them are not surprising. The top keywords are et and all. This is because scientists collaborate a lot, whereas humanity scholars are anti-social. And then, of course, discussion of things like sediment and sedimentation, which of course you would expect geoscientists to talk about a lot more than people in the humanities when they're talking about the Anthropocene. Perhaps organized in a more usable way. Here are the top keywords for the geosciences. As you can see, they're talking about precisely what you think about stratigraphy, climate change, and biology. But remember, this isn't just the words that are frequent in the geoscience corpus. These are words that are frequent in the geoscience corpus and very infrequent in the humanities corpus. So this is already showing us a disconnect of things that we in the humanities aren't talking about when we're talking about the Anthropocene, that the geologists are. As for what we in the humanities are talking about, well, we have this reputation for being self-absorbed and naval gaze in the humanities, but this is a pernicious stereotype that happens to be borne out by the facts. But we don't just talk about ourselves. We also talk about things. What kind of things? Well, things, things. Some things. Beings. We have a tendency to be very specific in the humanities, it turns out. Joking aside, the sort of perspective we got from the corpus about what humanities literature that deals with the Anthropocene is interested in, is interested in nature and space and time as humans are experiencing it. That's what comes out strongly when we contrast ourselves with people in the geosciences. In addition to looking at keywords, we looked at collocates. These are the words that appear frequently in the text close to the term of interest in this place, Anthropocene. Here are the top collocates in the geoscience corpus. And what this reveals is a strong preoccupation in the geoscience corpus in geoscience research about the Anthropocene with dating, with deciding whether or not we want to formally define the Anthropocene with when it's beginning or onset or start is, whether it is an era or an epoch or a period, it's duration, this is the kind of discussion that geologists are having about the Anthropocene. It's very different than the kind of discussion we're seeing in the humanities, where in some ways the humanities have a broader array of topics we're talking about, but there are themes like the effect of the Anthropocene on humans or particular groups of humans. And unlike in the geoscience corpus where the Anthropocene is very much a sort of question, the Anthropocene as an event is taken for granted for the most part, it seems like in the geoscience, sorry, in the humanities corpus, but the name is considered to be up for grabs. And there's lots of discussion of things like, should we instead be calling it the capitalocene or the plantational scene, the highlight that it's not all of humanity that's responsible for these global changes. The final type of data we looked at was topic modeling. We got, I don't have time to go into details, I'm trying to be brief here, but we actually got what were an unusually clear set of topics out of topic modeling on these corpora. And the unsurprising but depressing result is that there isn't very much overlap in topics of interest between the three different academic disciplines. There are some cases of some minor overlap. So you can see for instance, that both in both the humanities and the social sciences, there's sort of a secondary interest in indigenous studies and both the geosciences and social scientists have a strong interest in GIS techniques. But even on things where you'd expect all three corpora about the Anthropocene to have strong topics showing up, what you see is that for example, if you look at climate change, the geosciences talk about it a lot, but references to climate change and the humanities and social sciences are not going very deep. They're sort of offhand references and it's not central to the discussion. So this is validating people's instinct that what we have here is sort of people talking about the Anthropocene but really talking about two or three different types of objects. Now, when you're doing this sort of stuff, you have to do some interpretation. You don't wanna just leave all the data in its black box. You need to peek into the box and peeking in the box, myself and my two research assistants. These are the interpretations we came up with. And while this means that doing this sort of research as an art as well as a science because of a layer of interpretation, my interpretation I think is going to come out as obvious. Now, loudly stating the obvious is what makes me a philosopher, but what I'm about to do, which is loudly stating the obvious with data to back me up, that's what makes me a cutting edge philosopher. So here goes. What I see coming out of the geoscience corpus on the Anthropocene is they really focus on those issues of dating in part to avoid the sort of ethical and political issues that they would see as contributing to bad science. And so even though the Anthropocene has caught up in all sorts of ethical and political issues, they're sticking to the parts of it which are sort of furthest away from that. This is almost the opposite of what we see in the social science literature, where advocacy surrounding the Anthropocene, things like fighting global climate change and species extinction and things like that are the real priority. And trying to understand the changes themselves sort of take the back seat. But this leaves us a sort of gap in research trying to understand the human side of what's going on in the Anthropocene. The geologists are trying to understand what's going on on the geology side. And here it seems that humanities have tried to step in trying to understand from the human perspective these global changes. And so what we have here is three different families of disciplines all trying to give us answers to a sort of distinct set of questions and all of which would benefit from being able to draw on the insights and methods of the other, but to date for the first 20 years of research on the Anthropocene at least what we're seeing in the data, failing to do so. If I had more time, I might go into a little bit maybe if someone wants to ask a question about this about where are the prospects for maybe building some bridges? And I'd be happy to talk about that. But just for a sake of time, I think I'm gonna call it here. I'll be happy to put the slides again that have data on them if you want to ask me to do so during Q&A. Thank you. Hey, thanks everyone. I tried to find an unmute button for all so we could all like applaud, but apparently that doesn't exist. But I like all the clapping emojis. So we received, oh, and thank you to the presenters. Those were all incredible and it got me really excited about all the research coming out of the lab. And before we move into Q&A, I did wanna make one quick announcement. We are actually in the process of accepting applications for our next round of funding. So if you listen to those presentations and thought, I have a great idea for a research project. We are currently accepting applications for grad student fellowship residencies. So that's $10,000 for spring 2021 where you'll work alongside another graduate student resident. We have a faculty fellowship available for $5,000 and then two performance and exhibition grants. So if you have a great idea for a project, please do submit those to Digital Matters. Submit a draft to me or to David and we'll give you feedback on that. And even if you have applied in the past and you weren't funded, I really encourage you to try again, maybe submit it to us and we'll give some pointers on what you could do differently this round. But we really look forward to seeing those, the research projects you have in mind. And I think Marissa has added those links to those funding opportunities in the chat box as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and unmute or ask to unmute all of our speakers. And then that way, if you wanna respond to a question, you can. Some of the questions are for specific presenters, some are for everybody. Actually speakers, I think you can just unmute yourself. So feel free to do that. Okay. And we're gonna start just from the top of the different questions that showed up in the chat box or in chat and feel free to add more questions. We already have about 10 but we do have a little bit of time. So I think we're okay right now. The first question I had is for Jeff. Have you considered adding these names to open street maps if you're familiar with that application? Since OSM supports multilingual names for features, if in OSM they would be very widely and freely available. And then some context for my question, I started working with the ruralutah.org to support their efforts to assign addresses to folks living in the Utah part of the Navajo Nation from the OSM side. It's a different angle on getting native people better represented on contemporary general purpose maps. So Jeff, that's great. First off, thank you, Martine, for the question. Second off, what great work it sounds like you're doing. To answer a little bit, we haven't gotten to the point of talking about open street map. I'm aware of it. It hasn't really gotten into structural conversations yet about the technology. One of the issues that I think might come up in that future conversation is sort of access and maybe sort of the proprietary or sacred or culturally sensitive nature of some of the place names. To some extent, and this depends on another question in terms of where the names come from. To some extent, the names are not ours, right? They belong to the indigenous people to provide them. That happens through community interactions that people at the American West Center are engaging in. So different hogs of the machine of the project are dealing with community engagement and cultural protections of information and heritage. So I think that in the end, or sort of further down the road, it would make sense to add the names that are a little more public or a little more openly accessible to open street map. But there haven't been specific conversations to do that just yet. So I hope that answers your question. Thanks, Jeff. The next question we had was for Megan. First of all, they say, Megan, love the project. Can you talk more about your ideas to use 3D objects in the classroom? I understand how useful the Fremont artifact could be, but the column from the governor's mansion? Are the artifacts intended to connect students to time and place? Is the ideal to have a lesson plan accompany a given artifact? Yeah, so would it actually be okay if I shared my screen again? Sure. Okay, so this is a good question. So what I did was, so here you'll see the MakerBot Thingiverse website and they actually have a lesson plan feature and it's a little buggy with the formatting, but I did try to put one in. So this is a summary overview and background. So this is kind of like the historical information provided by State History who has the artifact. And then I put in this artifact primary source analysis. So the idea, and this is all sorts of buggy, so it doesn't look very, it doesn't look the way that I wanted it to be formatted. But the idea that I had was that teachers would be able to access this and perform a primary source analysis. And I actually adapted this from the National Archives. So it has these qualities of artifacts, type of artifact, uses of the artifact, what might it have been used for? What does it tell us about technology at the time? Who, when might it have been used? So those are kind of like brainstorm questions from National Archives that I liked a lot, so I inserted them. But in terms of how this would have worked, I was fully prepared for this to not be a good thing in the classroom. I was fully prepared for this to not make any sense to the kids and for them to be like, what? And because I didn't have 3D printers when I was in high school and middle school. So I was like, I don't even know if this is gonna translate. But that being said, I could see if not in a classroom setting in like a museum setting, this being really useful. So for example, at Hill Arrow Space Museum, they have a like education like wing, like a huge classroom of their own and a bunch of demo space that they bring in schools and they like kind of meet in there and they'll do like summer programs out of there. And in a space like that, I could see 3D printing being really useful as a way to help teach the kids about the technology of it but also help them connect with like the material that they are there to see in the first place, in a place like a museum. So in a classroom, I agree with you, the Fremont artifact might be a bit more compelling rather than an architectural piece. But then again, if you're an architecture student and you're studying something and on the other side of the country, if you're able to print pieces of that building and like engage with them materially, that might be useful for like your research. I don't know, there's a bunch of situations where I could see it working really well and others where I could see it not working very well. And I was open to that. We'll see what happens in the future, but I hope that answers your question. Thanks, Megan. Carlos, this next question is for you. Do you have a sense or other research about how topics are discussed differently by these disciplines, e.g. how global warming is discussed by humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, et cetera, and whether this problem is due to the newness of Anthropocene or a more general one to siloing of disciplines? So good question. I want to say my impression is that it is more to do with the siloing of the disciplines and here's why. So take discussion of contemporary climate change. Both geoscientists and social scientists recognize that it's not something that falls squarely within the province of their discipline, right? That it's changes in the atmosphere and the oceans are tied to our politics and our economy and things like that. And so there's always nods to that, but what you see is very little research that successfully integrates, oh, we're going to create a model that involves both economic processes and atmospheric processes in more than a toy way or we're going to do a collaborative research that would show up and the way we'd see this showing up in the corpus is we would see the sort of keywords that come out for climate change and say the geology corpus, things like CO2 and glaciers and things like that. You would also want to see these in the social science corpus if the social scientists were thinking about the relationship between say economic growth and CO2 emissions in any strong way rather than just occasionally not into it. And we just don't see a whole lot of that. And so I suspect that it's not just because this is a new concept or new issue, but just because of all the barriers academics have to actually doing the sort of cross-disciplinary collaborative research. Okay, thank you, Carlos. I'm going to direct this next question to Aislin, but if our other speakers have thoughts, feel free to add on as well. So Aislin, so can you tell us more about the question of audience in your project and how it affected your decision of what to display and how to display it and what tools to use? And again, Aislin, feel free to start, but if anyone else has thoughts about that question as well, it'd be great. Yeah, for sure. So I think in Turtle Island, there's a long history of historic science and recognizing indigenous peoples like archiving their identities or their experiences and their stories. So the fact that a lot of the projects that I worked with to think through my own methodology dealt with archival photos being kind of pulled from the dusty shelves and put on social media or shared with the indigenous communities made me think a lot about who a photograph is for. So with my grandpa's photos, obviously, I'm sure at the time it was nifty to have a camera in 1950s. Not everybody had one. And he was working in a place that was just unlike anywhere he'd been. So the photos were for mementos or whatnot, but it bothers me that, but it excites me too that those photos have not been seen outside of my family. And I think that because so many of them are of these individuals who probably don't know these photos even exist or they could be photos of people's grandparents, it makes me think about the, I guess the notion that they do need to be repatriated, that the audience of those photos should not just be my family, nor should it just be the academic community or a group of settler scholars. So I think with the map, I'm hoping that the audience for that map is the community, the indigenous community. And I'm hoping that I can grow from that because I have photographs of other locations. But at the same time, in Canada at least, there's this really strange obsession and it's predominantly amongst settlers with the North and with the idea of the Arctic, but it's so often romanticized and glorified. So there's this whole sort of genre of nonfiction and fiction written about the Arctic that is very, very much so romanticized through the eyes of like the settler explorer or somebody on an expedition. So I think this, I want this project to be something that provides something concrete to those individuals, but at the same time decolonizes those ideas in more productive ways. And then at the end of the day, gives these images that are ultimately of selves, they're of people to their people in their communities. Any other speakers have thoughts about your audience and how that helped determine what data you used, how you displayed it, what tools you used? I'll say briefly that I actually took my main audience in some ways to be the Earth scientists. In fact, I gave a long version of this presentation to our geology and geophysics department in the spring and we're aiming to publish in a journal that they would read. And so that really did affect the way we were framing things, not just because we felt like we had to hold ourselves to maybe a particularly high standard and the written version of this and the way that we present the data because it's going to scientists, but also in some ways in the written version of this we're more cautious about the claims we end up making than the claims I just made to you in the presentation just because there's less tolerance for being a bit speculative and experimental. Thanks. Jeff, the next question is for you and I'm curious about this as well. Where did the native place names come from? Is there a database that already exists or did you have to find and compile them before adding them to the map? Yeah, so this is largely work that other people in the project do. So Scott, who at least was here earlier, I don't know if there's a big list, I think he's here still. Scott and a bunch of other researchers at the American West Center have been doing some, I mean, it's really like a multimodal, multidisciplinary effort. There's been sort of traditional historical research from things like reports about land and those kinds of things. There's been oral history research. There's community outreach to current tribes. There's going to be a survey asking about place names and asking for input. So there's a real sort of, I think that's a huge bulk of the work is compiling place names. There isn't a place as far as I know that these names have been collected before. So that's a large share of the labor, I think. There was actually a related question further down which it's probably good just to address it now while we're talking about place names. Is the spelling that you use for the names standardized slash agreed upon? Yeah, the short answer is, I don't know the answer to that question. The longer answer is that the spelling of names, of place names, I think are standardized and agreed upon within indigenous communities, specific to language groups. I don't know exactly how that process happens but there's definitely variants between indigenous communities and that gets parsed out in the way that the map visualization is displayed. There are different layers for different names based on language groups. So you can sort of toggle and compare and contrast and see differences in that regard. Thank you. Megan, this next question is for you. It says, did you happen to scan print any objects in situ, like a column still part of a standing building, for example? In your opinion, what would be some of the challenges slash benefits of doing so? Yeah, so I did not, well, kind of. So this is a very good question. We scanned things that were as small as an arrowhead or a coin as well as a MK6 atomic bomb. It was an earth, obviously, but that bomb was like the size of my dining room table, very, very difficult to scan, but it was kind of one of those situations where it was just this massive thing and we had to get creative about how are we gonna capture every nook and cranny of this thing. So it is possible, and what I would recommend to people who are curious about scanning larger items, like buildings or building parts, is working with, yes, Anne, it was an earth. What I would recommend is an Xbox Connect or there's an app that you can get on your iPhone called Display Land and it's free. And it is such a cool app that I know some archeologists at SWCA and State History are starting to experiment documenting like archeological ruins with it because once you capture a space like that, you can upload it into like a VR setting or you can just access it on your iPhone and see like kind of what it looked like, which is obviously very useful. So I think it can be done. I personally didn't do it, but the challenge is I could also see like, if you wanted to make a print from that, you would have to somehow fill the empty space that like wasn't captured. Like if you're capturing just like a door knocker, for example, and it's like this big, you're scanning the front, you would have to go into a 3D rendering software like Blender and like physically attach a back to make it printable. And it just depends on like your comfort levels with like 3D rendering, if you can't do that. So it's definitely possible and check out Display Land if you wanna do like big sites because it's really easy to use. And Rebecca, I don't know if you saw the other question from Utah Humanities, she messaged it to me privately. I have that too. Okay, okay, cool. I'll wait. If it's a different question, let me know, okay? Okay, yeah, no problem. Cause it's a very good question and it's just too away. But the next question is for everyone. So feel free to jump in if you have thoughts about this presenters. I can see how many tools and layers of knowledge you had to acquire to develop your projects, which can be intimidating to people wanting to venture into digital projects. How do you think from your experience, this process could be more systematic and subsequently more sustainable? Yeah, I've got thoughts about that. So I think that there's sort of a general trade-off, at least in mapping choices, between open source and customizability and then sort of like prepackaged, maybe corporatized versions of digital mapping. And there are lots of choices in between. The reason that we went with the harder choice on my end was to be open source and to be able to customize things. But I think that there are some great options. ArcGIS I know is a tool that a lot of people use. One of the ones that I'm high on is like Matbox, which also uses leaflet visualizations and provides a GUI interface for that. A lot of those kind of tools will cost money. So I think that that's sort of the balance that you have to strike. Another part of the decision-making for me was I wanted to come away with some skills, which is debatable if that actually happened or not. But I at least came away with some experiences and some familiarity on the coding end. So my advice to anyone who's engaging in a project is first off, just go for it. Like just start trying crap. You learn so much in engaging with different tools and software and those kinds of things. And then second off, like really sort of play, like try out different modes of mapping, try out ArcGIS, try out Matbox, try out like running a basic leaflet visualization and just see what they feel like, see what the level of entry in terms of knowledge really might look like. And I think that that's the way to go, but that's my hot take, I guess. Yeah, I would say in the same conversation with mapping we've chosen different modes of mapping, but mapping was not something I had experience in. I knew I wanted to make one, but I didn't know what I was doing. But this is gonna sound like an ad plug, but the thing that blew my mind was just how many resources are available through the Marriott Library. Like the GIS services, they work so closely with you one-on-one to work with what you want in your map. If you're not able to or if you're overwhelmed to do something like code your own map, there are those resources to help you. So that was really something, I didn't know that when I went into the project, which was really scary, but then once I realized there were a lot of people in my court that wanted to help, that was super exciting and that made me feel more confident moving forward. That makes me so happy to hear you say that. It's true, I believe it. Okay, will we have any other presenters wanna weigh in on that or ready to move on to the next question? Okay, so Megan, this is the one from Utah Humanities and it's a very good question. Could you please talk more about your thoughts regarding the benefits or limitations of representing real objects, which are made from different materials, having a certain heft, color, texture, patina in plastic. What is lost or gained for learners by learning only the shape of a thing and not all of the other elements that make it real? As a field, why are we so interested in investing in technology such as digital printing rather than making efforts to connect teachers to museums that have active teaching collections of real objects? For example, AMFA, which has a Utah history teaching box. Yes, so this is my boss, Megan Ben-Frank at Utah Humanities and she and I got lunch one day and I told her about this research project and she was like, why are you doing that? This is ridiculous. We need people investing time in the museums, not into these digital rabbit holes that museums don't have enough money for. And I really feel for her, like I agree. I think that in the museum field, we have kind of an obsession with forwarding, like being digital and being like the next best thing, but we're like still paying our employees a minimum wage. So this is a very good question, I agree. In terms of what is lost when it's printed in plastic, the reality is that a lot is lost and that can never be recreated. And for that reason, education collection, which a lot of museums do have is better even if they are replicas that are made just for that teaching box. But in terms of 3D printing things, I don't think that that is necessarily the point of 3D printing an object. I think that it's more about allowing people to appreciate the material reality of something from anywhere. So my main concern is more with accessibility rather than replicability. So if someone is in St. George and they're a 13 year old with a 3D printer, I don't think that the UMFA is really gonna be on their mind. They probably know about Utah history through the daughters of Utah pioneers, but beyond that, like, how are they connecting with material history? This provides a new avenue. I also think that people who own 3D printers and have an interest in 3D printing, they're not always necessarily the same people who have an interest in history and in heritage museums of any kind. So having a presence in like the technological world, having a digital version of something that's even more materially accessible can be a really cool thing for those kind of people who might not be exposed to it normally. That was my thinking. So a question about audience raises its head again. Yeah, so who is my audience? I think is what Utah Humanities is asking. I think that my audience was more for museums who have an interest in this because there are a lot, it was funny, right? As I started this project, Hill Aerospace Museum started their 3D printing program and NHMU started a 3D scanning project with some sandals and they reached out to us. And everyone in the museum field, I think, like I said, has this obsession with 3D scanning and printing, like, oh, how can we use this? How can we do this? But they're not talking to each other about like, what's the best way to approach this? What are the best technologies? Should we outsource this? Should we, if we make it printable online, where does it go? Those kind of questions, I wanted to just kind of ground them into something experimental that could like give answers. And with the project, my audience was also, I was hoping to present at Utah Museums Association this fall and I was gonna make a poster and everything, but my presenter group, all of the staff got furloughed, so we decided to not present this year. Hopefully in the future, I can present my findings for them. But yeah, my audience was definitely people in museums who are thinking about using this technology and trying to kind of guide them as to like, okay, well, if you're doing this, here's the cheapest way, here's the most expensive way, here's this way, here's that way, but also like these questions of, should you be putting money into this? I wouldn't shy away from those because I think that it's good to think about for especially museums on a budget. So I hope that answers your question, Megan. Thank you. Such great questions. I think that our time for questions is probably up, which is perfect timing because we just finished all the ones from the chat box. If you have additional questions, please do feel free to email the presenters or you can email Digital Matter staff and we'll forward it on to them. I wanna thank our presenters again and thank everyone for attending today. It was so great to see you, even if I'm just seeing you in a square. As a reminder, one last time, October 1st deadline for all Spring 2021 fellowships and faculty grad student performance exhibition grants and residencies and all of those Digital Matters opportunities. Okay, thanks to everyone. David, did you have anything to add? No, thanks everybody for coming. I appreciate it.