 Okay. Perfect. Well, in that case, I think we can probably go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for being here at the digital matters fall 2020 research talks. I'm Rebecca Cummings and I'm the digital matters librarian. Today we're going to hear from the five digital matters graduate students and faculty fellows on some of the work that they've done this semester. One of the things that's going to work if you haven't been here in the past is that we'll have each presenter give a 10 minute talk, and then we're going to do a combined Q&A at the end for all five projects. So I do have one announcement before we get going. For anyone who doesn't know this our digital matters director David row will be on parental leave this spring. So if you have any questions at all about digital matters or our spring programming, please feel free to reach out to me or to Greg hatch will be serving as interim digital matters director this spring. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and introduce each presenter in the order that they're going to present. Probably. So first up we're going to have john Flynn who's our digital matters in American West Center graduate student fellow, and he's a PhD student in history, and john will be presenting on the native scholars clearing house. We'll have Max Schleicher, who's our digital matters graduate fellow and a PhD student in the Department of English, and he'll be speaking today on a computational analysis of poetry blurbs. Third we'll have Milad Mosari, who's our digital matters exhibition and performance faculty grantee, and he's also the assistant professor in the School of Architecture. So we'll be speaking on resonance map remote sensing and possible translations. Fourth, the fourth speaker will be Marnie powers Tory, who's a digital matters faculty grantee and an associate librarian in the Marriott library, and Marnie will be speaking today on interactive website to extend and sustain access to artists books. And last but not least, we'll be hearing from Todd Samuelson, who's our digital matters faculty grantee and an associate librarian at the Marriott library. Todd will be talking about negative space visualizing historical illustration processes. Now as our speakers present. We'll add your questions to the chat box and we'll direct those to the presenters during the Q&A session at the end. I do want to ask the presenters to be mindful of time and to stay within your 10 minutes to make sure that we can get through all five presentations and have time for Q&A at the end. So john is our first speaker but let me see if he's joined us yet john good to see you. Yeah, let me make you a co host. And then you should be able to share your screen from there. Okay, should be able to see my screen I think. Great. Thanks for the introduction. Rebecca should be loading. So, as Rebecca said I'm presenting on the native scholars clearinghouse. This is a project that's being done in conjunction between digital matters and the American West Center. So, a little bit of background on this just because it's even though it's the last day of November. It's kind of topical that November is the National Native American Heritage Month and the day after Thanksgiving or Black Friday that we usually know it as is the actual day so if you're interested in after this talk I'd encourage you to look at some of the resources they have. There's a website for this it's a government website so as a lot of government websites are it's not the best but it does points you in the direction of a lot of resources you can learn about on the last day of November. But on that note, it's related to this project because the focus of this is combining the resources at the university with the needs of Native American groups in Utah so the native scholars clearinghouse is essentially a digital directory of anybody who's at the university relates to projects that could aid or help Native American groups. So, the origins of this it's a project directed by Dr. Smoke at the American West Center, and I saw Jeff was here he started the project and I'm continuing it so it's been in the works for a while but it emerged from this realization that there are a lot of people at the university who are in very different parts of the campus working on projects that relate to Native American groups and this could be anything from in the medical center or humanities or architecture, but there is no clear and concise way to reach for all these people in one spot there's no way to connect them. You would have to go through all these different channels looking at different profiles across university to find them so our goal was to bring them all together to make it really easy for them to connect with each other but also connect their work to the community at large. So the first step in doing this would be actually connecting the scholars across the university. We essentially just send out emails to invite them to join in on the project. And send over the necessary materials that we would need to create a bio sketch. So, anything like a photo bio and links to the relevant work there. This was really important because since they know their project really well we wanted them to put it in their own words, and they would send that material over to us we've stored in a box drive. And then we put that on to our clearinghouse website. So, essentially taking their words and putting it all in one location. A really important component of this is as a lot of way things go in life word of mouth is the best way to pass information along. It's really hard to try to track down all these different projects going on at the university so we always ask them to recommend anybody who they think would be beneficial to be included on the site. So, we can constantly keep this website updated and that's a really important part of this is that it's not a static website. As these projects changed, and as new people come to the university and new projects develop we want this to be constantly updated so people can keep coming back for this relevant information. So, I'll show you the website at the end of this PowerPoint but here is a screenshot of what it looks like essentially as I said it's just a directory. And you should be able to go and click on any of these profiles that you see and it will have all the information. I think that these were these scholars are working on a really important component is we wanted it to look simple. So the site was really easy to navigate. There's only these eight profiles right now but as more profiles are added, we want it to be really easy to find what you're looking for so the next step in this is adding a search function to filter by these different profiles because as I said there's a really big range of disciplines going on here medicine humanities architecture and law. So, the next step beyond building the site is connecting these scholars with the community. We wanted to go beyond the university campus. Well that is a really important component that scholars can look at each other projects and perhaps collaborate we want these to reach to the communities that their work actually touches on so that groups in Utah can come look at these profiles and see how they can be how they can engage and interact so the next steps to engage with this larger community is launching the site it's and it's test based right now and advertising across the campus and beyond and then creating this search feature as I was discussing. So as there are more profiles added, it will look something like this we can come and navigate. And if you look over here on the right of the screen. You'd be able to filter by these different categories of law, health and medicine, because if there are dozens or more of these profiles and if you're looking for something specific, you can go to these categories and see, perhaps, you are looking for help with legal advice there's a lot of law. Or if they're looking for something that's engaged with medicine and health, they'll be able to easily navigate and find people in those categories so I think I need to stop sharing and reshare so I can show you the actual website. Are you able to see the website still. Okay, great so this is the landing page for it. With a brief description of it and then just to show you the user interface like I said it's very simple and that's intentional. And you'll scroll down. And again there's only these a profiles right now, but you'll be able to click and see these bios pop up and again they're written in their own words because they really know themselves and their projects best. So you'll have a bio at the top relevant projects and then really importantly are these links to outside resources so it's a point of exploration. I think Dr Warner has a couple of links and his as well. So you can come in and look at all these projects and then be directed to the actual sites that contain these works. And again, this will be constantly updated as there's new developments in the projects and new scholars are added into that. So I can put my email over here in the chat if you have any questions or if you do know anybody who you think could contribute to the site we'd really love to hear that from you. So the test site right now the university has to launch it so they're the ones that remove that test from the URL. And thanks for listening to that and look forward to any questions you have the end appreciate the time. Okay. Thank you so much john and well within time so I appreciate that. So our next speaker is max max I'm going to go ahead and make you the co host now. Let me get the screen share set up here. Awesome. So, as Rebecca mentioned I'm one of the grad fellows this fall, and my project was to fold to build a database of poetry blurbs from the last 25 years and then to do some analysis on those blurbs. So to begin with, let's take a look at what the back of a book looks like. There are a couple different parts of the back of a book. We've got the publishers description. The promotional quotes, and then frequently a bio as well. So, doing a project about the blurb the first question is like well what is a blurb actually is a little bit of disagreement in scholarship believe it or not about whether or not the description or the these quotes are blurbs so I'm doing both of them. But as you can see here there's about four or five different blurbs on one books to the vast majority of my database is these actual quotes just more of them per book. So, let's take a look at some blurbs don't actually have to read these but just pay attention to a couple things I'm I'm underlining here. So you'll notice that one of the things that blurbs do is that they give you these words like confession narrative working class poetry forms and styles, they gesture to you to be to tell you what the poetic modes the book is working it's telling you it's a narrative book, a lyric book, a poetry of witness book, these kinds of things. Second thing we can notice from looking at a blurb is that it also frequently frames the affect of the book. It's heart, vitality, passion, feeling these kinds of things are sort of foregrounded in the blurb the emotional interaction that you have as a reader or the emotional framing of the poems themselves. And the last thing we'll notice from looking at these guys is that often in blurbs they will make reference to a canonical author, in this case like James Wright or Walt Whitman and say that this poetry book is in conversation with one of those canonical authors. And then the last thing big pictures to point out is that we take a step back and think oh holy cow we've actually like underlined about six different things in each of these blurbs. In and of itself is pretty interesting because it means that the small chunk of text is actually jam packed with all kinds of data that we can try to extract. And so that's what my project is going to do. So the last kind of introductory point about the blurb is that they're really valuable to us because they're actually tied to specific times and places. So we can build a database of blurbs that came out in 1995 to 2020. And then through because they're tied to a specific time track how they've changed over time. That's like I've done here. So this is a graph showing the frequency with which blurbs mentioned the mentioned grief in them. And it's really interesting because you can see starting around 2015 is a big uptick in framing poetry around grief. And I'll lead you to your own conclusions as to why like 2020 is the top of the charts here. We'll keep moving on. So gathering data. How do I get all this data put together. So this is what a back of a book looks like. And this is what the back of a book looks like on Google books. So often Google books actually has like the preview of a book as part of the data for every book. And if you notice, we looked at that publishers description earlier at the top part of the back of the book that actually gets digitized almost always on the Google books record. Sometimes they also include those promotional quotes as well, but usually at least there's that that description. So what that means is that because Google has Google books as part of Google's open API, you can actually access that with a bunch of queries. Here I've got one that's searching for and Carson's glass essay, and then the the API will actually send you back. A nested data structure that then you can use to build a data set. So what I did was I started from I wanted to have like a list of books that were just sort of like the standard poetry books from the last 25 years. So I looked at everything that was a winner or a nominee for the major prizes from like Pulitzer to the Yale Younger Prize, all these things. And I built a sort of seed list of poetry books. And then I went into the Google books API, and then have the Google books API return like 400 other books that were similar. And from that I would just build a massive list of potential books, but then I would try to enrich with blurb data, which is my next step, building out more or getting more data about ISBN numbers publication dates, all these kind of things add to that data set. And once I started to go through that. I saw there wasn't wasn't super like helpful with in terms of like the descriptions were there but not enough So then I did a lot of manual work, doing a combination of OCR optical character recognition taking scanned copies of the backs of the books turning those into digital text files and then including those blurbs to my data set. Also looking up books on Amazon, where their review section in the middle has oftentimes has the actual poetry blurbs in them, and then manually looking books on Google books to see if I could stuff something out. So that was a huge part of the project, and not very exciting, until we finally get to analysis. So that leads us with a data set that looks something like this, where I have each line of my data set has a has the blurb, who wrote the blurb. Then the author of the book, the book that it's blurbed for as well as other things like ISBN etc. So let's start looking at what we can actually do with all of this data. So before I met, we noticed that like one of the things that it was talking about boys were talking about where the modes narrative and lyric that we see in poetry. So for those unfamiliar. It's kind of like a common place to say that there are two kinds of American poetry narrative and lyric, and the contemporary poetry is like, kind of between these two things that you're either narrative or lyric or somewhere in the middle. So we can start to sort of model that over time. So we look at mentions of narrative and lyric in contemporary American poetry, and we see that like, they were, they were very close to each other starting in the 90s but then they diverge and now lyric is about twice as likely to be mentioned as narrative so you can see a sort of divergence, potentially in style and contemporary poetry. So we might apply the same sort of thinking to other kinds of modes that we might identify in poetry. So things like algae, identity, history, nature, and to see what's changed over the last five or 10 years. So doing that we see that poems that evoke history, politics, identity, and personal have increased over the last five years, whereas poems that are books that evoke image myth and nature seem to be on the decline, maybe myth, maybe nature is going up in the last year or so. And lastly, like, algae is sort of flat. So we can use it, we can use it to get kind of an interesting bird's eye view of some, some major sort of like genre trends in poetry. I mentioned the sort of way blurbs our gear towards our affective experience of poetry, a fierce intensity of a book. So we can actually also model that. We can take a look at the 500 or so most common words, pick the ones that are like have a high emotional register and graph the frequency with which those appear. And as we can see here, starting in 2015 there's a big inflection point where more and more sort of emotional register words start to appear in poetry words. That's really interesting so let's follow up and try to see we can get a better understanding of what's behind that. So those words into positive and negative, and we see that like that the positive affect words are pretty like flat over the last 10 years, whereas the negative words are like ticket ticking up over across the board pretty broadly starting around 2015. So we see that there's something in the last five years it's really like shifted the way poetry is focused to like be expressing some sort of negative emotion in the way at least it's marketed, or at least framed in a blurb. So the last thing that we'll look at is as I mentioned this tendency to reference canonical authors like Whitman. So two things we can do with that. First just look at like what the distribution of those canonical authors are. So we see that actually in American poetry Whitman Dickinson and Stevens wall Stevens are sort of like by far and away the most frequently compared authors. So when we think about the canon as people like Wordsworth and Shakespeare, that maybe somewhat anachronistic, and maybe kind of like a newer more recent canon of American poetry. So, then we can also ask, how is that trending over time. And in general we see that the reference of canonical authors has been like a steep decline over the last 20 years, and they're about like a fourth or a third of time, less likely to actually mention that. And again this points towards if you're familiar with the field, a tendency in literary studies to question or problematize that even the practice of making reference to the canon so that that seems to be having an effect. So, wrapping up, we think about blurbs we think about the sort of marketing collateral tossed onto a book. This rather than the sort of like ephemeral or meaningless things are actually kind of data rich sources for us as scholars potentially. And that's all I've got. Thanks very much. And I'm looking forward to listening to everybody else into talking in the Q&A. Hey, thanks. That was great. Next up we have Malod, who I believe I just made a co host. Are you able to see the screen share. I see it. I'm going to engage it. Hi everybody. I'm going to go ahead and set this up right away. Can everybody see my screen? Yes. Okay, Dennis says yes. We will start here. My name is Malod Mazzari. I am from the College of Architecture and Planning in the program of multi-disciplinary design. First of all, thank you to Digital Matters for hosting this event and this venue and this conversation. In terms of the project, I'm going to go quickly over the background, then talk about the research and where I'm taking it. Soon as the semester ends as well, which will give me a little bit more solo nerd time. The project started in Taiwan where I was working with these environmental sensors like this here. And we'll look at the schematic of this in a minute where I had installed them throughout in this town of Mando in Taiwan. And this is the points overlaid with the interpolation of a heat map of the soil moisture throughout the city itself. So this is this becomes somewhat of an agricultural tool within the confines of this city. We were fortunate enough to in southern Taiwan with the indigenous Shirayan tribe also install these prototypes with a solar function. So the power aspect of it also becomes a sensor of its own of monitoring the landscape. So these sensors have ties to the land in terms of the methods in which botany and architecture also really unified in this hybrid way in Taiwan specifically. In terms of the sensors, there's visualizations of soil moisture on the left, as well as what we have is the Google spreadsheets, which are the web hooks that you use where these Wi-Fi devices can give you the time stamp, the temperature, the soil moisture value, and all that you would need depending on the variables that you declare. This is the actual device itself. So what we have here is the analog pins, which the sensor connects to in terms of the moisture values and needs, as well as the IC here in terms of the data package you could send. So over Wi-Fi and cellular, this works really perfectly. When I came to Utah, I went to remote places in Utah with this, and there is no cellular or Wi-Fi available. So I had to restart how it worked. Adafruit creates these Lora or long range radio sensors for environments where you can actually go ahead and send the same analog variables that you need in the process of to send the data packets over radio to a receiver that's within the confines of a few hundred miles, and then it can actually upload it to a server for you in the same process. So this is the one that I'm currently working with and looking at air quality in terms of Salt Lake City. And in terms of air quality, this is the argon, it's Wi-Fi, but there's a cellular version of it as well. The IC is here as well, and you have the same analog pins as well as digital pins in terms of the data that you can create. So there are various shields that you can actually work with in terms of these configurations and the variables themselves you have the control of. But zooming out, I realized that there's a notion of active and passive data that I'm working with. Active data is where I declared the variables with these sensors, but then there's all this passive data around us in terms of air quality, as well as other variables that we don't know that are being calibrated by our phones as well as our devices. So I've been really conscious of that. I've been like, how do you actually evaluate the two? And I think for me it's the more they interact for IoT devices, the more of an actual configured space that we have control over, as well as the legislation that goes over to in terms of the privacy that we want to control. So before I've been looking at agent based modeling as well. So not necessarily data visualizations in the stagnant sense, but if we go here, we have what are simulations of these because data is not necessarily something that just stays there, but it's living and it's moving and looking at the simulations of that. So the first agent based model that I've been going towards is looking at sonification of this data. This is through max MSP. And this is this example, I had a student help create for me but you can connect any API that you would like to it. What ends up happening is that you get a sonification of the JSON files that you hooked you, or if you like you can create web hooks to the devices that you have, as well as integrating other things. The project has expanded more and this is where I'm really, really excited about in terms of where it is. I've been creating, I started collaborating with an old friend who works and lives in Doha. And we're talking about the data that we're working with. I'm trying to see what kind of correlations we can make because one issue with IOT a lot of times it does one similar function. It creates one thing, you get the data for that, but and that stops a lot of times. And we're looking at creating correlations of climate, looking at climate various and various methods essentially where you get the data in terms of, oh, here's a chat to everybody. Nice. Looking at the environmental data, the air quality in both cities, as well as other things. And the midpoint in the semesters where I really had my epiphany with the project, which was not looking at air quality data only, but other things and this was at an honest point where I was actually at the hospital and my partner was getting surgery. I was sitting in the waiting room. The news is on and pre-election, if that's that, if that's a thing. And also COVID's happening in the hospital and my partner. And I remember looking at my phone and checking the weather and being so underwhelmed by what weather data does for me. And what that's done in the correlations I think is creating APIs and web hooks with the sensors themselves of combining air quality data with data scripts from Twitter. Actual word searches. So we're looking at Twitter. At the moment we're looking at the word breathe and how it's actually being tweeted in lifetime alongside air quality data that's out there. This is being conducted for a performance in February with the experimental sound studio as part of their quarantine concerts. And what we're doing is that it's going to be a night where we're going to invite other people in and my constraint is, but the data is there but I cannot touch the instruments that I'm working with. The instruments that I'm working with and how to do that is I associate Utah with the high desert. There's obviously with the news. There's this nostalgia like the future of the 70s. So what we're actually doing in the process. And what I'll show you an example of is the API is being routed through MIDI. I hope nothing falls over and fed into an analog synthesizer here. So what you hear is a lot where you're going to have to hear is a live stream of the air quality as well as the, the, the web hook of the sensors and Twitter stream that scrapes the actual word breathe simultaneously because I think it's creating a social climate like that. With the sensor does a little bit more for me than perhaps and it also lets me not touch the instruments with a dynamic. So I'm going to go ahead and change my audio. If I can just get a thumbs up when you do hear the audio configuration change please. You know, I actually don't have the privileges of those things. So no worries. There's speakers for a reason. Is there where is the microphone. Okay, there you go. That's my timer. But the reason I went this route for me was, I think one aspect that I want to emphasize and at the end is in this brief brief presentation is it's not about what data we have, but it's who the data interacts with and who the data comes from, especially in this active and passive round. And I've been thinking about that in terms of it's not about me just developing these sensors and looking at APIs and data scraping, but who out there also wants to contribute to the social climate. And if we're able to actually create convergences of where API is combined the process, we get a lot more interesting sonifications as well as visualizations of what that data enables us to do in the process, as well as created legislation, legislation, hopefully in governance and around the ethics of how we have data surrounding us. So I'll stop there. And I'm sure digital matters will help us in the spring to publicize the performance with the quarantine concerts at experimental cells. Cheers. Thank you. We would be happy to do that. Marni, I did give you co host privileges so let me know if you have any problems. And a lot I also like your background. I think it's really fun. Oh and Marni you're still muted right now. I got an error message that the host had disabled participant screen sharing. So I don't know if I need to accept co host. Let's see I'm trying again so I just put make co host. Okay, I got it. It worked. Okay. So, I'm just giving some background as others have done. This is about 2005 book art scholars, notably, notably Richard Minsky, Lynn s bias Daniel star, our arvid Nelson Johanna Drucker and Jerome again have added advocated for a quote digital digital platforms that will deepen and expand the scholarly study of print documents by exposing hitherto invisible levels of artifactual signification. And that's a quote from Lynn bias. And there's a number of web presence that have have occurred towards this effort. So, as far as Johanna Drucker's artists books online, for example, Craig Dworkin's eclipse archive. There's many more match slikers work. I think would would qualify as well. So from it as far as the artist books realm goes from about 2012 to 2016, a group of catalogers involved with our list which is the Art Library Society of North America worked on the web interface artists books, the source, which supports cataloging of artists books. I found that their volunteer group really couldn't sustain this activity. So, in January 2020 I presented at the College Book Arts Association annual conference and coordinated this panel between Ruth Rogers from Wellesley best shoemaker from and then myself. And that for that that effort further explored opportunities for a shared language between curators, catalogers and makers. And that led to this current project, which is a facet I suppose, of the larger project, which seeks to extend these efforts with a broader audience in mind. So these were our initial lines of inquiry. And now with colleagues from the Marriott Library user experience and web development team graduate student, Jonathan Sandberg, and I are building a public facing website that seeks to educate the broader public and facilitate use of a common vocabulary by scholars makers and community users of artists books. So the website, the database, visual exemplars and index hope to aid in the discoverability of artists books from entry level to advanced level. The site will provide information on artists books directives for using the index to ascertain the appropriate vocabulary for further research and invite the public to submit commonly used terms that hopefully will enhance discoverability. So, back to that January presentation, I gave so this gathering is the people who are exploring artists books as a scholarly area of study were the audience here so I gave them this sheet and I showed them a range of examples and asked them to assign a broader and a more specific term to each of the images. So what I was showing is essentially common forms that were referred to with a variety of terminology. They were either historical or relatively relatively contemporary terms, derived from common use in geographically and culturally diverse settings. There might be uncommon forms with no existing language of description. And then we also have been looking at materials as well as technologies and practices, both historical and contemporary. So for example, what's the term for pasting a pepper packet in a office bound book. Okay, so our initial research process was a joint effort with the rare boats cataloger alley McCormick. Jonathan and I collected data and and charted that data, and then the cataloger was to make updates to the mark records in the library catalog. So we, we searched terms that we were familiar with in the common in the following databases of the Library Congress genre and form, as well as exploring some about subject, which is more complicated. And then the Getty Research Institute and our BMS and then finally, the RLS ABT. So initially, our data gathering looked like this. We had approximately, I think 1100 books these are all items in the collections at the end of the rare books collection sorry so we were collecting data both John returns and subject heading terms, as well as creator terms and we made suggestions of additions or deletions from the mark records. We then gathered our own kind of data here that is focused on matching terms, but for what makers, which I'm identifying as a maker would link with how they would link with cataloging terms. So, this is our chart that we are using now and it's kind of a document that oversees the workflow between our group in the web development group. So there's currently, this is a 50 page document currently. And we had it by a slightly different methodology. So we have our definition here, the ABT definition on the right, and then related terms are listed here, as well as sources for further research. So we are developing a list of terms to possibly propose to the RLS group, who best shoemaker is happy to get in touch with the Getty control vocabulary is a very touchy thing, but Beth is a cataloger and a very good cataloger and respected cataloger so hopefully some of these terms can make their way back into cataloging language is part of the goals. At some point we'd really like to look at content and subject as well as I mentioned the difficulties are that the Library of Congress requires at least 20% of a book to be about a specific subject. And it's difficult for the cataloger to accurately interpret an artist's intention, especially because book artists can often be intentionally oblique, cryptic or ambiguous, and are kind of the ideas of the clear and more accessible the information is the more likely that it will make it into the catalog and the book into a new reader's hands. So, I wanted to show you. Let's see. This is actually not what I wanted to show you first. I wanted to show you the artist books website which I seem to have closed my apologies. So it's not super easily. It's easy to find unless you know where the link is and the reason for that is it is intended for catalogers so you can type a term in their search and and up will come the term and the definition, as well as an example and then related terms with a link so our website is similar to that. We have modeled it with a similar indexing. We will have this a home screen which is really partially developed at this point, as well as an about section that will talk about the people who worked on the project, and really exciting is a suggest the term, which will kind of be like an also called so at my school or in my practice I've called this X Y or Z so we hope to link that data as well. If we move to the artist books terms themselves, we can type in a term here and click on it we have the opening artist definitions that's us. And then the artist book the source definition as well. And then there are our synonyms. So, these are true synonyms what we consider words that are very descriptive and that work. And then we also have I'm going to show you one more example if I have time, the accordion fold. Actually, I'll show you the accordion bindings is a little more interesting goes a little more in depth. So, the idea is that again we'll have the two definitions and then links below so this is the broader term, which will take you to fold out books which is still within our site. And then clicking in the wrong places here, as well as concertina bindings that's a related term so that'll take you to another definition on our site as well, and then folded books is the term that the Getty uses for, or the closest that they have to an accordion binding. So that takes you directly to the link of that described vocabulary. So I think that that is it I hopefully I did okay. That was great thank you. So Todd, Todd is up next and he'll be our last presenter for today. Todd let me know if, if I successfully made you a co-host or something went awry. It should work. All right, thank you to everyone. It's a pleasure to participate with with all these projects and thank you to everyone who's made this possible. A quick description of my project my my aim in this. My new space project is to develop a framework for distinguishing historical book illustration processes by automating the identification of various techniques, and my primary focus this semester has been to create a logic model for this pursuit that maps characteristics process and their relationships to to one another. I'll go into this in a bit and to start to build a corpus of high resolution photographic details of these historical illustration techniques under magnification. And my my concept is that all of this will be in preparation for a later machine learning phase of the project. So what is the what is the purpose of doing this work and what do I anticipate maybe some outcomes of the project in in the kind of a wider view in the field of book history. The growing attention is being paid to issues of the material object and practices of historical book production. Looking at the equipment looking at blocks or plates, and a component of this approach which interests me involves the close examination of these objects used to produce historical books. As a means of reconstructing technical and cultural practices related to labor in the printing house during various periods. And so, while identifying illustration processes may seem like a pretty fringe. Highly specialized activity and it is one that I think in the field is recognized as pretty challenging that takes a great deal specialized study to become competent at. It can also be very useful in determining the location the period and other circumstances surrounding the production of a book and. In using that contextual information to come to understand the distribution of the uses of a book by various readerships. And so a tool which is able to automate this process and utilize machine learning. In order to provide this information could be very useful and personally I feel that in providing libraries with the ability to augment catalog records with process specific information it could be very helpful. And as such is sort of a parallel project to to Marnie's. Very briefly just a word about why I've structured the project as I as I have this methodology is parallel to a digital humanities project that I worked on from 2012 to 2015. It was a melon project, mountain funded project at Texas Anims initiative for digital humanities media and culture. And the idea of this project was to create an open source OCR engine that was capable of improving the readability for the 45 million pages in a couple of proprietary databases Ebo and echo. The way that this is relevant to my current project is that it involved researching historical objects and documents as a step toward training the OCR engine to recognize historical forms. That was kind of the essential thing and so it was this marriage of typical digital humanities practices and resources with the scholarship and and methods of book history. And that combination is what I hope to kind of get on the on the trail of in this project. So, I've been able to take take some of those structural elements to inform my current project. As a result, I've structured my methodology upon what I refer to as intrinsic and intrinsic approach rather than the more traditional contextual model so if you if you read books about illustration practices historical techniques. The recommendations are is that you might pay attention to the date of the imprint of the book you might look at the location of textual elements, whether that's movable type or whether it's script placed in or on to the matrix that produces the print of the presence of plate marks these things are largely external to the image of the print itself. The intrinsic approach is to utilize the characteristics of the marks made upon the matrix, which could be anything from a pair would plank block to a boxwood and grain block. A copper or a steel plate, it could be a big chunk of limestone and to determine the tools that were used and the features strictly based on the marks that are made. So what advantages might this contextual model provide at magnification features, such as the taper at the end of a line, or the behavior of ink around the contours can determine a great number of variables and provide a lot of significant perspective to the book's uses and audience. So, just to give you a better sense of of how I'm approaching this stemma in my work. My concept is that the models flow charts will allow a reader whether that's a human or a machine to look closely at the marks transferred from the matrix to the substrate, and to make a decision about the tools that created them. The substance into or onto which the tools interacted and and by that the techniques involved. So this is one piece of the model. It also includes kind of equivalent charts for categories like chromatic prints linear prints, some combined processes as well as modern process prints. But to go into this in a little more detail, this portion of the model involves tunnel prints, which I defined as the deployment of dots of various sizes and shapes to provide the impression of shifting values of light and darkness in the completed image. And so the, this quadrant of the, of the stemma is to show a true stipple dots placed individually on the plate block or stone rather than being applied in groups. And so to go a little more closely. This true stipple is individual dots appearing on a white background. There are a couple of options up above is an example of a stone lithograph, in which the marks are made on the surface of the stone with a grease pencil or brush and have a comparatively soft appearance at the bottom, the lower example is marks inscribed or scratched through the surface coating of a copper plate to create a stipple intaglio print, and this gives a more angular appearance. And as you as you can sort of see by looking at these if you had these without any other context, it would take a fair amount of experience and background to be able to distinguish the two. Here's another part of the flow chart, which is a negative stipple which is clearly different and at least at this level of detail represents a negative stipple cut into an end grain block is a technique of wood engraving. So, my, my work is the data has been gathered into this type of sheet that some identifies the artist in the specific book and the plate and then has the, the, the number of images that are linked to those particular things. Which has been challenging in these difficult times to produce, but just very quickly. Here's an example of a wooden gravy and block, speaking of the the matrix or the source of these prints to the left, a block by the 20th century would engrave for George Macley which is held in the Christian Memorial Library at Texas A&M at the right 3D scanned and printed block from Matthew's diascorities printed in Prague in 1562, which is at the University of Illinois. And one aspect of my research involves the examination and measurement of these historical blocks to determine the way in which the, the removal of the material and the marks that were made indicates features that are not visible in the in the completed print. Experiments with printing 3D printed blocks and seeing if they can be, can be run on the, for example, a modern proof press have been, I would say less, less productive than the ability to visualize the visual, the physical object of the block to see those marks that are made and wasting or carving away than the negative space. The component of my project involves, so a little more investigation of the equipment and objects used to produce these books in the period. These are, this is a common press and a rolling press that are both housed at the Museum Platon Moratus and Antwerp, both date from the 17th century. And the common press is regarded as the earliest working press that's still excellent. And the scars that are visible in the wooden and even the metal components of these objects testify to the continuous repetitive action, the motions that were performed in the process of their, of their labor and the creation of the books and it seems to me that the actions still present as these negative marks upon the tools used to create the illustrations are the lasting mark of the physical labor of the of the forgotten laborers these anonymous workers that the produce these these works and so I'm working on a letterpress printed book that includes a text about this as well as six of these three block relief illustrations that utilize the techniques from the period. To create portraits of these objects with all of their imperfections and and flaws and it seems to me that these specific materials, the machines and the blocks and the other objects, which depict the way that they were used and abused altered and damaged but but yet retained provide a necessary addition to the currently understood narratives of book history. Thank you. Hey, thank you so much Todd and thank you to all of our presenters I always love hearing about the projects that are happening and where your research has taken you. We still have about 30 minutes, but I do think we're going to lose one of our presenters early Milad you have to leave soon. Do you have time to take one question we had from the chat box. Of course, yes, and then, and then I have to leave this room room for another. No problem, I was interested in this as well so from Anna need trower Milad do you set a certain key for the sonic visualizations. Set as sorry, what was the question. You, well and Anna you're probably here as well if you want to unmute but the question in the chat box was, do you set a certain key for the sonic visualizations. You, and it usually does not start at the right key, but then you have to find the right place in terms of the sonification that you like. One thing that I always refer back to is Charles Dodgers 1970 piece of Earth's magnetic fields, where he actually is the KP index of the electromagnetism of Earth and the solar flares are sonified. So I feel like that's the space that I usually start in. And I have to wrestle the synthesizers to get to that key that I want to show that show the frequency change in the keys that I want to. Thank you. Milad Milad if we lose you thank you so much for presenting today. Thank you very much. Bye. We have several other questions in the chat box that I want to get to you before we move into just open questions for anyone who who asked we have a few comments to and I tend to kind of skip over the comments because I unless there's a question embedded in it but there's a question here for for john or sorry from john to max max what did you use to make these data visualizations and I saw that you answered it in chat but I bet other people want to know the answer to that as well so max you don't mind answering that everybody I use so for the analysis I use are and then I use the there's a baggage in our called GG plot, which stands for the grammar of graphics. That's the GG. And, and so basically it's designed around the idea that like you've got a data set, and then you can kind of translate this sort of the way you would think about a data set into like some function that produces graphics and so it's really manipulable. You can kind of do all the things you would do to data set grouping slicing doing all kinds of stuff within the functionality of building a grant, like some sort of data visualization. And there's a lot of like add-ons and features and customizations you can do so it's really, really nice thing to have because you can produce it once you get sort of code figured out you can produce a bunch or you can tweak tweak it really easily so really highly recommended. Was that pretty easy to learn. Over the summer I did. There's a professor of data visualization who published like his course on for free online, and I play around with that did a few classes of it and that was really helpful. I think his name is Andrew Heiss, H ISS at like Georgia State or something like that. And so I play around with that and that and like with a lot of things just there's there's a ton of resources online and and people build a lot of fun add-ons like I was trying to play with doing a animating the graphs and there's like there's a gg animate that you can add on to actually create turn your graphs into gifs and stuff like that, or gifts. And so there's some really easy like fun things that you can do once you kind of have it figured out. Nice. And, and Jeff Turner says he's a good follow on Twitter so announcement. John, I think we have a question for you from Greg hatch, and it's a little bit of a comment but I think there's a question in here too so Greg had said, I wonder if your site could be tied to the find a researcher tool. The faculty.utah.edu backslash find a researcher, perhaps even shared database entries since that site also has bios links to research publications and has keyword search. So John, have you considered tying your tool back to other tools for finding people on campus. Done that at this stage but that is a really good idea because I think it would help reach a much larger audience and get a lot of that, like feedback of the resources. I think if it could somehow tie into that database and still stand alone as its own, what the category is that it's, you know, the native scholars think that is a really good suggestion that I think would help because we are trying to reach a much larger audience. I had a follow up question to that as well. Have you considered expanding the database outside of the University of Utah to other researchers in Utah like at BYU or Weber Utah State. That's something I had been considering I need to discuss it with Greg because at this point it's only internal to the you because it's going to. We're going through the university websites that's why it has that test label on it right now. I think that because it is serving the Utah community at large that it would be a good idea if we could somehow incorporate affiliated scholars or outside scholars to become so much larger database that's not just, you know, University of Utah faculty. Thanks. We also had a question in the chat box for Max from Craig. Max, are you accounting for books without blurbs, i.e. no data for that part of the spreadsheet but perhaps nonetheless meaningful, a silence that might speak volumes. And again, I saw you answered it in chat but I thought that was a really good question, so I wanted to. That was a really good question and Craig also and I exchanged a couple things privately that were helpful because yeah like one of the things that he points out to is that you know there may be something about blurbing which is particularly like kind of commercial so the more commercial sides of poetry may tend to have more blurbs or be more blurb heavy and yeah I think I think that's a good point I think in general my process. I didn't discover a ton it's I'm kind of wondering if maybe we're we may be on a sort of like part of the cycle where now people are tired of them. And so like I know like there's some presses like canary impresses a good poetry press that doesn't do any blurbs at all. And so there may be some kind of like reaction against some of that process. But I don't have a haven't like track that is like them showing up as like a null back cover blurb kind of thing, but that would be a good thing to do and a good way to like track like whether or not the practice itself is becoming more popular less popular over time. So it's a good thought. Can I ask a follow up question. These were all just such fantastic presentations. I enjoyed them all. I'm curious max. It looks like you did a lot of the parsing kind of, you know by hand you saw the kind of identify these keywords and and and you know trace over time which is fantastic. I'm really curious in terms of your knowledge. How well these keywords actually tracked with your affective experience as a reader of the poetry books, because these are so driven towards sales or prestige or what have you. So I'm just kind of curious about that angle of it. Yeah, I think it in general attract pretty well sort of I was meant I was kind of dancing around this when I was talking about lyric and narrative which granted aren't necessarily affective things. But like I was saying like, it sort of passes the smell test for contemporary poetics. And so that's really interesting. In terms of affects like I said, like it's interesting to me that like you see like a consistent pattern among negative, these negative affect words, things like that suggests that isn't it isn't necessarily fluky but that there may be some underlying thing like that. So, as I look to like kind of policies and think towards publication like, I think I'm going to be looking specifically to sort of answer that kind of concern by by looking at really things like that that seem really consistent. But it tracks pretty well. The things that are a difficult with tracking with my experience I mean, one of the my initial like the thoughts behind this research project was looking thinking for ways to sort of like model the sort of sublime language the language around a negative pleasure that often gets tied to contemporary poetry. And so I'm still thinking through like how exactly I want to do that but it's like, I think one of our blurbs even it says like the collision of heart and mind is sort of like the way. That is framed around a collision of two things that don't go together or collision of negative and positive. And so I'm working through some of that. And, and that's kind of like figuring out like, if it's possible to model some of those things that I'm that I definitely think are trendier through this language will be the sort of next step and potentially pretty difficult but we're working on it. Very cool. Thanks. Marnie we had a question for you in the chat box or actually kind of two questions from Eric Rimbond who I think had to leave but we'll read the question anyway because it's a great one. So he said interesting project, how do you guard against endless proliferation of terms. That is makers might continue to make finer and finer distinctions between different variations of their practice but they might be useful to catalogers under a broader term. Is there a notion of generality versus specificity in the terms that you're collecting. Great question. And, and certainly we are modeling ourselves after catalogers so we are trying not to parse things, any thinner than we need to. But at the same time, the connectivity or the connections that catalogers and curators make are often very different from those that that makers make. I found as a maker I am really responsive to data as I collect it, and that's really objects are or artifacts are really what I respond to with my work. And I think I'm the same as a researcher, same way as a researcher so as data comes in I think we will probably have conversations I hope with people who will provide language and so I'm not super concerned I guess is what I'm saying with the things getting out of hand. I think the field of art of book art is growing but it's it's a, you know, a fairly small community and I've been in conversation with a lot of people in our field for a number of years so the conversations that I've had thus far in regards a shared vocab have been very positive and have, I think, been helpful in filtering things rather than broadening to large but I think catalogers are also more open to that now. And then, then they once were so I mean discoverability is our shared goal. I hope that helps. I know his second question was about viewer reader, and I actually interchange those words quite commonly, but visual language does have translation into verbal descriptions and that's what this project is about so I think that reading takes on visual aspects as well as verbal. Thank you and I think that's all the questions we had in the chat box so now I just open the floor up to questions that any of you have. Thank you for Marni, I was curious. If like, I was like there's something about, you know, like culture that oftentimes enjoys the process of categorization especially you know you think like, Oh, this metal band they're not really metal they're thrash metal slap you know like you can kind of get into and that's part of the process of enjoying it, you know, understanding and developing a taste for like the subcategories. And so I'm curious about you as like sort of a maker slash archivist to like how you think the process of actually going through this different distinguishment this distinguishing parts or distinguishing categories, like how do you think this kind of connection to your own sort of like enjoyment of it and also how do you think that part of the that would kind of play out for someone on the other side like someone who comes to the website, how does this like play into their enjoyment of this genre. Well, I think that research and the humanities parallelized parallels research in the sciences right so our ability to gather information and then to codify it is really key to our understanding and to finding meaning. And I think it's important as makers to recognize what's out there, you know, and, and how our work and our thoughts and what we're making and doing relates to the larger scope of what has been done historically and what's happening right now in the art world, or more specifically the book art world. So, I don't know if that answers your question, but yeah, anyone else. A question for Marnie as well. How do you distinguish between what is the criteria for seeing which an artist book and a non book artifacts. Well, I don't. I mean, honestly, my umbrella is really large, I think that all of it can be included. It's, I don't think you know it's similar to I'm not super interested in the divisions between poetry and prose, for instance, I think that's fairly antiquated I hope I'm not upsetting anyone by saying that but I think that books that need to be published in the now are often artists books and outside of, you know, pure research utilitarian books so that's my personal opinion, but to clarify they do need to have a visual and material presence to be included, but you know that could take on a more performative role or it could be a digital, a digital book in a digital space. I didn't have a question if I could monopolize this title that Todd with your project. I love how you're trying to re-inscribe the materiality of the printing process with regards to images and books. What is your larger goal, do you have a larger goal of using that sort of full full charge or the category, categorization method that you've generated and using that process to create data that would eventually be incorporated into a books metadata, for example. I think so you know the, for me the heavy lifting of this project was was partially just trying to figure out a kind of binary structure for for going through these various techniques and historical practices and figuring out relationships and and those sorts of things and then finding examples that are linked to those particular processes. And so I'm very interested in having some kind of production that may come out of this that you know, to step back. One of you may know Terry Ballinger who was a, he's a book historian, he founded rare book school. Originally New York it's now in Virginia, the University of Virginia, and he's taught a course on historical printmaking identification 45 over 45 times. And over the course of his career, he's also a McCarthy genius award winner. And over the course of his career he's put together a body of examples of these various prints to put into the hands of people to scrutinize to look at under magnification and his statement about the sort of efficacy of this training is that his identifying prints in my experience is a history of failure, and you're going to be thwarted as often as you're going to get things right. It seems to me that finding some kind of process that is objective ish that provides you with a sort of a degree of confidence could be incorporated into catalog records and other other descriptions that would provide researchers with access. Right now, I think the part of what motivated Marnie in her project is that people come to our reading room and say can I see an example of a tunnel book and sometimes that information can be found in our catalog records but more often I think our curators knowing the information are needed to kind of make that that contact. And so to have something like that for the rare books collection for older material for printed ephemera for maps could be could be pretty key. And as I as I hear several of these presentations but in particular I'm thinking about john and Marnie, you know we, we have a four year theme in the digital matters space of sustainability, and how do these projects continue to live on past the interest of the individual architecture. So Marnie with your thesaurus for example if you were to make this robust thesaurus is there like a sustainability plan of either like a, like an, a book artists professional organization that might take ownership of that maybe like the Getty takes ownership of the art and architecture thesaurus and preserves it and keeps it moving forward or john you know is the American West Center that will take on this website when you're done with it. Do you want me to go first on. Okay, so the question about where it where it lives was a big question that led me to want to do this project here and now. So it's housed at the library and the library's book arts program is fairly well established and just from the level of work that has gone into this type of research for the past, you know, 15 years but really more like 30 I don't have concerns about it living on. I think that it will be sustainable. And as far as my limited interest I don't think that pertains quite frankly because I started as a staff with the library. Part time actually, and then have been in a full time position for 20 years, but a faculty for only 10 and as an administrator I find very little time to do research so this project has really kind of allowed me to springboard into action, and I don't intend for that momentum to slow. So more to come. And for the clearing house. I think for one it's a university Utah website so it's got that dot, you taught edu so as long as the university is still running that will exist I think in terms of keeping it alive and updating it. It would just need some sort of middleman to facilitate that I think the American West Center would probably have a pretty vested interest if there's a future graduate fellowship for it or maybe the assistant director will kind of facilitate keeping it up to date so I think it's pretty sustainability because it has the university back in it. It'll just need someone to kind of keep it alive as well. Yeah, with yours I would see not so much the challenge of like the website going down it's making sure people are aware and know about it to keep putting their, their name, their name. Yeah, I think that's a big challenge and I think kind of sparing new scholars to actually because it's a given tech because they have to volunteer the information and fill out a bio. It kind of takes a little bit of prodding so I think as it hopefully is against momentum more people will be willing to send in that information. If you have any more questions for any of our presenters, except Malod and if you have a question for him. Feel free to email it to us or directly to Malod. We have that question. Well if that's it for today. Thank you so much for attending. Thank you to our presenters for all your great presentations to everyone I just hope you have a successful rest of the semester and a really wonderful break. And if we don't see you again. We will see you next semester. Thank you everyone.