Digital Possibilities for Research and Communication in the Humanities

so good morning everyone um I I will answer the question that someone asked me during the the opening out there what is the religion Professor doing at a um cyber security conference and to be honest I'm not entirely sure but um I I liked the way that our the previous presenter put it um taking software and what it was meant to do and thinking about what it can do and that's sort of what I've been doing for many years I'm a religious studies Professor I've been here at Canisius for 18 years and have often been pushing the edges of what some of the software can do for a long time I was the one that would break our course management system and still do that sometimes and Tyler and Mark get the benefit of that but um I wanted to talk today and hopefully this can also be a conversation just as we had with the previous session of some people realizing oh these things that can be used in different ways thinking about how this can change or maybe some of the questions and concerns that it raises in terms of what those of us in the humanities are doing um and so as I say part of it is the question of what do these tools and these changes offer us as an alternative way to do some of what we've always been doing and so I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about my own experiences with some of these kinds of Technology uh the LA I I will admit this again is where I I wonder what I'm doing here because the last time I took a computer science course was the AP Computer Science exam in 1989. I did have a college level course in Fortran prior to that but um those skills obviously uh would need to be updated if I tried to do anything computer science issue so um first question just in case you've never heard the term digital humanities there it's a term that gets used a lot although it doesn't necessarily have a agreed on definition I will show some examples or talk about some different ways people think of that but for me it's really the question of how can the technology and software and just connectivity help us do things that we've always been doing to pursue traditional kinds of humanities activities research publication and looking at as I say how sometimes the tools can offer New Paths and new results um if we think of the ways that knowledge and writing has been and technology has progressed I did actually in my graduate work study cuneiform writing ugaritic not necessarily a hugely marketable skill um think of the transformation that something like movable print and mobile text created in the transmission and copying of information compared to when it had to be copied by hand down here at the bottom left is my dissertation director he is a scholar in the Dead Sea Scrolls and even that field has had some interesting interplay in the way that technology can help in reconstructing and trying to piece together from little pieces of of ancient Scrolls partly on the assumption that if you have multiple copies of things and you can sort of estimate okay how many letters would it fit into this spot and we get a few letters here can we recreate it now obviously some words are more useful than others in trying to put those together so if it was the word the that's not as useful if it was the word Canisius or Buffalo or other kinds of things it becomes more useful innovation and sometimes events Force us to innovate of course there's often going to be resistance to it I I know that some of my colleagues at the college sometimes felt like The Barbarians were at the gate when we start using new things um certainly into 2020 there was concern about trying to move everything online you just can't do things online well Mark and I and Tyler and I have had conversations about how to to tackle that um but in some cases it means that we use new technology for old purposes or that we're finding New Uses and then some things we use for a little while and then we leave them behind this room is a perfect example of it I was one of the early users of this room and you notice that these desks are tables are on Wheels and they're oddly shaped the intent was to be able to make small working groups and we even had um TV screens that could be connected and had six cables coming out so that each student could hook their laptop and share and we discovered that all those cables were more complicated than it needed to be as things like go to meeting which of course did not you know get capture the market share and other web conferencing tools became available it became less necessary to have the cables and you could just sort of switch through the screens in grad school we I was in a committee meeting where we actually had an hour-long debate about whether chalk was technology and the final conclusion was that it was technology but it really was irrelevant to the conversations for the computer technology committee that we were in uh how how many people may have had um or their grandparents and parents may have had the Encyclopedia Britannica in their house and at one point that was huge advancement and availability of information um now of course we're good reasons some of the material in the Encyclopedia Britannica is um treated skeptically I also remember using these these little calculators in in um and it offered other kinds of information as well um and I I remember the debates about well you can't make them rely on calculators because they're not going to have be carrying a calculator around with them all the time well I I beg to differ but um that's a whole other story um and this is of course showing my age because I remember when um Merlin was a big big hit in in my school as well as pong and some of the early games I also remember being fascinated by watching about the old Battlestar Galactica where Commander Adama could dictate in the words would appear on the screen and that appeared that that seemed so futuristic well it is there now even though even if the computer can't always recognize our our words Oregon the idea of having a communicator that could carry with you that can reach all kinds of places um my father's Texas Instruments 99 4A that I used to write my college applications and all of my high school essays is actually in the basement here we donated it as part of the updated technology um and and I still laugh at the fact that the three and a half inch floppy disks that I used through a college um I could fit all my college papers for a semester on one disk um because they were mostly Text data and not anything else um talking now about some of the changes I've seen in when I was in college I went to school in Philadelphia and our College was one of the first to start with um computer hard catalog and because we had three schools in Consortium they put all three taired catalogs together on one system and so you could sit at one college and have sort of a virtual shelf and see what books were you know because if you've ever gone to the library and you find one book and then you see other quotes nearby that may be useful you could see if it is as if it was a virtual Shelf with all three libraries combined um now of course doing a computer search compared to the old card catalog meant that sometimes I would end up with a long list of possibilities but it was still so wonderful to be able to go through that quickly instead of having to walk back and forth between the ketones I also remember trying to help my advisor create a web page for our class and many of the professors at my school were basically taking a document saving it is HTML and putting it online and I kept trying to say well you know so much more with that um it was at least a start but there were so many more things to do so as I say this is also part of where sometimes as we start using the technology we're just doing the same thing and not realizing what else can be done um of course one of the challenges we find along the way if we're not careful and this is where it takes careful planning is that something that we made a few years ago is no longer compatible um and and trying to make sure that we back things up in a way that they can be recovered is very important um I also remember uh we have had some discussion of mapping earlier as part of a project that did for a I did some archaeological studies during during my doctorate I had to make a map and so I did not have access to GIS and other things so I basically had to sort of drag the dot and put it on the spot accordingly um and so it wasn't terribly accurate and had to be redone each time I'll show in a few minutes how GIS has made that task much easier um same thing for my dissertation I had to create this map sort of by hand in approximate where where these dots went um not not my proudest accomplishment but it got the job done um while I was on an excavation they started bringing in and showing how you could use GIS and surveying tools where you could basically hold the marker and the surveying machine would capture it and the surveyor had already been tagged to make sure it knew the precise Global location and so you could then at the end of the day download it and create a digital picture of what we found so much better than the hand drawn and hand copied ones that we were otherwise doing this is where it gets fun for me though because in biblical studies one of the important things we do is compare manuscripts and so there are people who have spent their whole careers comparing multiple manuscripts of the Bible and they've created these very carefully categorized books and you know all different kinds of symbols showing which manuscript is which and it's useful but it goes immediately out of date as soon as new manuscripts are found and I had a professor who was editing a English translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in particular biblical texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls based on all these Scrolls and I was in class with him and shortly after this was published I said to him well wouldn't it be great to digitize this and so that as new things are available you could add them immediately or you could click on something and it could be hyperlinked and show the full text and he just sort of glared at me because years I was implying with years worth of work and effort were wasted that really wasn't my intent I do want to mention briefly that some people have compared the Jewish text the talmud as hypertext because on a single page it takes the um the mishna a text from the second century and then adds around it the rabbinic commentaries from various places and so in a printed version the same kind of thing as we get when you can click on a link and go and look at other things so now this is getting into my own project uh for the last 12 years or so I've been working on a project looking at religious diversity in Buffalo as I said my degree and my dissertation had archaeological components I was looking at religious practices 2000 years ago now I'm just looking at religious practices now and interaction between communities so it's not as far off from where it might seem and my idea was to start using digital resources to make these available I had my students recording interviews I had data on different churches I had material or you know artifacts and textual materials and wanted to make this available and so this again is also where I have limited technical skills and so sometimes relied on my students and my colleagues but this the tools are becoming easier and easier to do this in the same way that even 15 years ago trying to send students out to do oral histories would have required providing them with uh significant and costly equipment um and lots of editing challenges when everything used to be recorded on film or physical tape and then had to be transferred whereas now literally you can send them out with phones my previous presenter was talking about take using an Android phone to capture many of those images uh this makes it more accessible in easier so I started started making a map and at the time I was thinking okay I'll just Point by Point add them into Google Maps um we'll show where that led in a minute um I'm not going to play this interview but as I said I had students recording interviews and this was a really fun one this was a Sikh gentleman who he says in the interview that when he was a young man he became a hippie but our hippies are not like your hippies because our hippies cut our hair where your hippies grow their hair alone and it was just a sort of fun fun way of expressing all of it he was also a professor at off stage for many years and um in in chemistry Department uh we now have started to take uh some of those interviews and the TV show that was produced at the college and put them into a exhibit on on online as I say initially I was going to put them on my own website but putting them as part of the New York Heritage digital collections makes it much more accessible um and oh I wasn't intending the fact that you would even see me on this page that was not potential but um we and we have the the some of these videos categorized by different different topics and um these videos at one point were all on Vimeo but with no cataloging without with file names that had no indication of what the content was and it made it kind of difficult to find having it now in a searchable spot so that even theoretically if someone just searched um Interfaith marriage Buffalo um in a Google search then it would even um pop up for him um we also through New York Heritage have have a larger collection of various documents and things that have been digitized um so going back to the log books uh the network of religious communities is our integrated group here in Buffalo and the Erie County Sabbath School Association was the original group that that ultimately led to What's called the network of religious communities and I don't know here excuse me uh and and we have so we have various things digitized including some really fun books uh Church directories of from 1927 to 1931 with pictures and information about my Mila congregations um in this process we've come across a lot of amazing pictures at different churches this is from a church in black the black rock neighborhood of Buffalo West Buffalo um great political imagery here American flag a map of the continent and um I don't know how well you can see I I can show you a picture later but it's got three Native Americans pointing in a map of the United of North America basically Mary the country is yours now uh all kinds of fun imagery there uh at the network of religious communities we've been going through the archives and found all fun kinds of things um this was supposed to say Church women United but um I I kind of like the spelling here better uh one of the other fun things we found was a set of posters that um shopkeepers could put in their Windows indicating that they were not selling inappropriate materials so fight the build column um and then in that same box we found several I'm sure just for purposes of illustration some of the inappropriate materials that they might have been um selling in their stores so detective no detective magazines um sort of early Esquire kind of thing and a men's bodybuilding magazine now um various other kinds of things and part of the question is how do we get a local organization to make these materials available but they can't necessarily make the archives physically available for people to come into so trying to um create plans for digitizing and and cataloging these pictures and other materials and making making them more available one of the interesting things we found was a pamphlet on the foreign speaking and negro sections of Buffalo um not the not not a very modern great way of referring to it and one of the statements in there was about how native born Americans were being pushed out by their arrival of foreigners kind of forgetting the fact that most Caucasian Americans were of course none not um of native descent anyways but this little document um as I say you know was published locally and there are probably copies in other places but to digitize this and make it available becomes very important and also in interesting information to show that this was about 1926 the average salary for ministers was about fifteen hundred dollars um average pay has gone up but still not not that great um this gets into the next issue though that one of the things I would like to do in working on this project is eventually tied into something like citizen yeah we we have citizen science where people will do participating bird counts and other things and submit their their bindings to a a website and group that is tracking it all there are examples of the citizen history option so where we have story core for instance on the radio and where there are other kinds of projects where people will contribute and so I would love eventually for people to be able to view my project and be able to say oh you know you're you mentioned Westminster Presbyterian Church here I have pictures of my grandparents wedding from the 1920s here here are here are pictures and to be able to add those um now I mentioned a moment ago mapping so this again is where you can sometimes have the fun overlap where people who have the technical skills can help those of us who don't and so I started at one point as I said trying thinking I was just going to add the locations Point by point I told my student that was working for me okay I want you to start from the Yellow Pages and go through and start adding these sites and he says well I'll give that a try but he says you know um he was a computer science major he says I can write python code to capture that from the um from the online Yellow Pages now the data was messy because it included things like healing water spiritual Spa which isn't exactly a religious site but it gave me 900 data points to enter into the map and then it needed some cleaning up because in some cases there were three entries for the same congregation so Saint Paul's Catholic Church Saint Paul's Catholic school and Saint Paul's Catholic rectory where three different items for the same for the same congregation um but it allowed me to work through and identify and and say okay is this Christian is this Jewish is this Muslim and um to to create all this now let me see this is alive should be a live version of it um this was the one that I was able to to code um um and then I shared shared the files with one of my students who was in data science and he he made a better version but as they say you can um well this one is not allowing me to search but one of one of the things that I want to be able to do with this eventually is to also do it chronological um setting so that you can say okay show me what where the congregations were in 1900 show me where they were in 2000 because for instance the Jewish congregations were largely on those of you that know buffalo in the Broadway Market area East Buffalo where many Eastern European immigrants settled in the early 1900s that's where the synagogues were now in the 2000s they're out in the suburbs now this map is currently available through some links online although after last year I was having some conversations with some people about the question of do we even though this is all based on publicly available data do we really want to draw a map for people who might have nefarious purposes to say you want to find where all the mosques are in Buffalo here I'll show you all the locations um and so I'm still trying to think through how to do that uh speaking of things not always maintaining technological capability um my website is actually broken right now because the embed code from arcgis does not quite work so I just have conveniently not fixed that but one of the great things with arcgis is that once you have one data set you can connect it to other data sets so for instance we cou