This presentation examines the early stages of a digital humanities project. The proposed project collates and represents various forms of data about the American author Henry James—specifically, his history of crossing the Atlantic by steamship.

1. The 19 Voyages of Henry
James
Shawna Ross
Arizona State University
June 11, 2015
Twitter handle: @ShawnaRoss

2. Larger project
transatlantic travel institutions
• Literature foregrounds the institutions of
transatlantic travel to critique transnational
political, economic, and demographic
systems.
• Writers put the ocean liner to work as a
machine for transnational thought by
recovering the international tensions at
play in ships whose construction
attempted to hide these tensions.

3. Why Henry James?
19 transatlantic crossings, 19 ships
“I am utterly unfit for the sea.”

4. Why Henry James?
• Content
– “The Patagonia,” “Pandora,” letters
• Style
– Figurative language, model of consciousness

5. The Spreadsheet

6. Preliminary charts
What is this information capable
of?

7. Preliminary charts
What is this information capable
of?

8. Preliminary charts
What is this information capable
of?

9. Preliminary charts
What is this information capable
of?

10. Why an interactive map?
• Multiple audiences: scholars, students,
public
• New currents in literary criticism
– Transnational modernism, oceanic studies
• Digital humanities
– Non-empirical approach to data
– Archive-centered app design

11. So, Neatline

12. Richly textured archival
approach…
“The Arabia, and Cunard Steamships,” Scientific American (8.25): 5 March 1853.

13. …enough gratifying design
decisions

14. Upload: A “take all comers”
model
• http://color.hailpixel.com/
• Stories, letters, criticism
• Wikimedia commons
– http://commons.wikimedia.org/
• NYC Passenger Lists
– Internet Archive
• My Aunt Robin’s cool silhouette of Henry
James (Katherine McLellen, 1911 [not
1905], Smith College Museum of Art)

15. Nifty picture?
LET’S DO THIS THING.
“History of American Steam Navigation,” Illustrated London News, vol. 16, May 1850: 368.

16. Psychological Q
How to maintain desire?
• So. Much. Time
– No progress  no reward
• Discovery by interacting with data? No
more.
– Research: me-facing
– Presentation: public-facing
• Must we script what people learn?
– Exhibits & expertise
– Spreadsheets & spontaneity

17. Psychological A
• Each platform has ideal time per day
• Public buy-in
– Casual learning a high possibility
– Don’t use public buy-in as an excuse for
laziness in app/site/exhibit design
• Basic job as a teacher
– Structuring but not controlling learning
• But not wholly a teacher
– K-12: possible doesn’t mean you must do it

18. Technical Q:
Tools reveal my conceptual
shallowness
• Overkill
– Difficult to ignore, bypass, or switch off
irrelevant Omeka/Neatline features
• What is my unit of analysis?
– Literary text, geographic point, voyage, ship?
• Omeka assumes 1x (item) = 1y (collection)
– Ship : James voyage = 1:1
– Ship : shipyard ≠ 1:1

19. Technical A:
• Understand that technical mastery will not lead
automatically to humanistic insight
– But I still must understand various steam engines in
each issue of Popular Mechanics!
• “What is my unit of analysis?” still rules
– Decide whether to foreground discrete unit (each
journey) or comparison (technology, nationality,
formality?)
• Theory of Data Relativity
– My items are sometimes particles, sometimes waves
– Dublin core: all particles, all the time

20. Results:
Embrace the idiosyncrasy!
• Not a map? It’s not fundamentally
geographical?
– Level of intervention (work by hand) may not
necessarily be the same as the mode of
presentation
– Most “shiny” part might be automated
• Interactive ships
– Draw me silhouettes!
• My unit of analysis may be a ship
• My only 1:1 relationship = voyage:ship
• Radical subjectivity of archive
– Indulgent metadata as scholarship