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Digital Humanities at the University of British Columbia Library: The Royal Fisk Gold Rush Letters.
- 1. + Digital Humanities at the University of British Columbia Library: The Royal Fisk Gold Rush Letters PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2015 Vancouver, BC Larissa Ringham Digital Projects Librarian, UBC Library
- 2. + University of British Columbia Library 15 branches ~300 staff members 4 million+ visits to branches 6.2 million+ visits to website 140,000+ questions answered 1.6 million+ loans to UBC users 13 million+ e-book and e-journal downloads 7 million+ items (print and electronic) 1.4 million+ e-books 229,000+ journal titles 45,000+ items in cIRcle 500,000+ items in digital collections 890,000+ maps, audio, video, graphic materials
- 3. + UBC Library: Digital Initiatives Scholarly Communications Copyright cIRcle Digitization Centre Digitization Projects Digital Preservation Teaching and Learning
- 4. + Current projects www.fromstonetoscreen.com Epigraphic Squeezes Royal Fisk Gold Rush Letters
- 5. + Royal Fisk Gold Rush Letters Project The materials 900 original letters from the Cariboo Gold Rush era in British Columbia, 1862-1868
- 6. + Gold Rush Letters Project The background Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF): Flexible Learning
- 7. + Gold Rush Letters Project The objectives Provide undergraduate History students with an immersive experience in Digital Humanities Facilitate engagement with primary documents through transcription, description and analysis
- 8. + Gold Rush Letters Project The team History Department Library Rare Books and Special Collections Library Information Technology Library Digital Initiatives Library Technical Services
- 9. + Gold Rush Letters Project Year One (complete) Library Digitization and creation of digital collection with basic description at Full text harvesting from the Wiki and metadata enhancement in the digital collection Classroom Student transcription and description in UBC Wiki through individual and group work Glossary and taxonomy development Student reflection and assessment Project team Transcription and project assessment workflows developed
- 10. + Gold Rush Letters Project The results
- 11. + Success: Engagement with primary sources “The [visit to Special Collections] helped me to understand the … palpable materiality of the primary sources, their rarity and worth.” “Because of my working with the Royal Fisk correspondence, I will not be so intimidated in trying to use these kinds of sources for my own research purposes.” “Glimpses into 19th century life like these could be taught in a textbook or via lecture, but by learning about them through a project like this makes them much more relatable.”
- 12. + Success: Reading handwriting and deciphering language “At first this project seemed like it would be very easy, but it was surprising to me how varied the abilities were in the class.” “By comparing the transcripts to the alphabet chart … as well as to the transcripts of my classmates, I got a much better sense of how to read the cursive.”
- 13. + Struggle: Technology The “digital” in digital humanities was the main stumbling block
- 15. + Gold Rush Letters Project Year Two (in progress) Continuation of student transcription Textual encoding and markup
- 16. + What did we learn about doing DH in the library? Capitalize on our skills Identify incremental steps Be realistic about what we can support
- 17. + Digital Humanities at UBC: Environmental Scan Environmental scan of DH activities at UBC Environmental scan of DH centres and projects at other institutions Develop survey for dissemination to UBC researchers, faculty
- 18. + Environmental scan results …. [in progress]
- 19. + Gold Rush BC Initiatives (Laura Ishiguro’s blog) http://blogs.ubc.ca/lmishiguro/2014/09/02/gold-rush-bc-initiatives/ Royal Fisk Gold Rush Letters digital collection http://digitalcollections.library.ubc.ca/cdm/landingpage/collection/r oyalfisk larissa.ringham@ubc.ca
Editor's Notes
- [introduction] I’m going to be talking to you about one of the digital humanities projects that the UBC Library is currently involved in, and talk a little about how it developed. I’m hoping that maybe some of the aspects of the project will serve as a jumping off point for some discussion on digital humanities projects and the library’s role.
- [Background and context] The UBC Library is ….. 2nd largest research library in Canada Ranked 14th by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) UBC Library system has 15 branches and divisions including off campus and Okanagan campus locations
- [Digital Initiatives] DI includes: scholarly communications copyright, cIRcle (our institutional repository) digitization centre Digitization centre: The core of what we do in the unit is what you would expect - digitization projects – converting analog materials like print into digital content and making them in digital collections online. The majority of the materials that we digitize are items that are held by the UBC Library, most often by Rare Books and Special Collections. However, we do regularly partner with other departments and units across UBC and in the larger community. We are implementing a digital preservation program with Archivematica, and are developing a web archiving service with Archive-it to harvest institutional and endangered web content. And increasingly, our projects have a strong teaching and learning component to them which dovetail in our beginning work with Digital Humanities initiatives.
- [DH projects] We have two ongoing projects at the moment that fall under the banner of Digital Humanities. Epigraphic squeezes project: a group of students on the project will be doing a lightning talk as part of Thursday’s program and I’d really encourage everyone to go and listen to it. If you are interested but can’t attend the lightning talk tomorrow, I would suggest that you to look at the fromstonetoscreen.com link when you have a moment. It is fascinating project involving a collection of epigraphic squeezes held by the UBC Classics department, which are raised paper inscriptions of ancient inscriptions in Greek that the students are translating. Instead, I’d like to talk about the Royal Fisk Gold Rush Letters project.
- [Royal Fisk Gold Rush letters] The Royal Fisk Gold Rush Letters are collection of 900 original manuscript letters from the Cariboo Gold Rush period, 1862-1868. They are written by Victoria area merchants to a forwarding and shipping agent in San Francisco by the name of Royal Fisk, asking him for various commodities and supplies and relaying news from the communities they were shipping the goods to. The letters are a valuable source of information on trade and commerce as it developed in Victoria during the height and decline of the Cariboo Gold Rush era. In addition to the letters from Victoria merchants, the collection includes correspondence from merchants in other locations like New Dungeness and Port Angeles, Washington County, Portland, California and Montana.
- [project background] The collection of letters was acquired by the library’s Rare Books and Special Collections unit (rbsc) a few years ago. Laura Ishiguro, a History department faculty member specializing in the history of British Columbia, would arrange for her classes to come to RBSC each term to work with the letters and talk with then-RBSC archivist, Sarah Romkey about the letters. Both Laura and Sarah recognized the value of encouraging skills development in archiving research and techniques, and the students always enjoyed a field trip out of the class. Laura had expressed interest in digitizing the materials so that her students could do some sort of work with them in class, but the opportunity and funding to make this happen never really arose. However, in 2013 we were fortunate to receive funding from UBC’s Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund. The fund was created to enrich student learning by supporting innovative and effective educational enhancements. We received the grant through a special TLEF fund for Flexible Learning, which is essentially evidence-based, technology-enabled teaching methods that improve the learning experience for a broader student community. The TLEF funds projects for durations of 1 to 3 years, and we have so far received funding for 2 of these years.
- [project objectives] Our goal for the project was to provide Laura’s History students with an immersive experience in the Digital Humanities by developing in-class exercises to transcribe the handwritten letters, and by using digital tools to facilitate those exercises. One skill set that Laura had identified as needing development in her students as possible future historians and researchers is the ability to read handwriting. For many, it is not longer a skill being acquired, and Laura knew that if they wanted to do research and use primary source materials it’s something that is often required.
- Our project team consisted of members from across 5 different units: 1. The History Department, with Laura Ishiguro, the prof, and Meghan Longstaffe, a TA to facilitate the in-class exercises and assist students 2. RBSC was a key member of the project particularly at the beginning given that they are the repository for the Royal Fisk letters. Sarah Romkey, the spec coll archivist at the time was the one who initially conceived of the project along with Laura and who determined the metadata schema for the digital collection. 3. Library IT, with Paul Joseph, Systems Librarian, is also an important part of the project, working with various IT groups on campus to determine the implementation of some of the digital tools and his co-op students, Eka Grguric and Krista Parham, working on the workflows and processes for the digital tools. 4. Library Digital Initiatives, we are co-ordinating the project from the Library side. We also had a library school student, Cristen Polley, who digitized the letters and created the basic metadata. 5. Tech Services, whose conservator, Anne Lama, worked to treat and stabilize certain letters to prepare them for digitization.
- [project status at end of year 1] The first year of the project is complete. We have digitized the entirety of the collection and made it available in our digital collections portal. We hand-selected a number of letters that the HIST 305 class transcribed in exercises using the UBC wiki tool, and we are in the final stages of reviewing the transcriptions for ingest into the digital collections so that we will have the transcriptions as well as the original images viewable on the same page. At the end of the term the students wrote about the assignment on the class blog, which allowed them to reflect on how successful they felt the exercise was, and also gave us the assessment data we needed to evaluate the project.
- What are some of the findings from our objectives?
- [outcomes: engagement] Being able to follow the process from the initial perusal of archival docs through to transcription and reflection at the end of the term allowed Students to feel deeply engaged with the process. Knowing they were the first to work with the letters was also a big plus for many of them. They also expressed appreciation in seeing the letters in their physical form at the beginning of the term, then working with the digitized versions of the same letters as part of the process. Many students commented that they felt like actual historians – that this exercise gave them the inside scoop on what historians do, and enjoying the opportunity to research history rather than simply learn ABOUT it.
- [outcomes: handwriting] Deciphering the handwriting was a difficult thing for many students, which we expected – it was after all the focus of the project. The transcription exercises were individual, although many students chose to work together on them for collaborative support. In addition, many of the letters were discussed and corrected in class as a group at the student’s requests. As well, students also learned 19th century vocabulary, abbreviations and measurement units. The difference in vocabulary and grammar led some students to reflect on how much language has changed over time.
- [outcome: technology] I will admit that this was a bit of a surprise to me. The Library IT co-op student and the class TA spent quite a lot of time putting together a very clear how-to guide with screenshots and provided extensive support. Meghan, the TA was at every class so she was right on site for any questions whenever the students had them. However, a number of students still had difficulties accessing and navigating the UBC wiki site. They had trouble finding the site – despite the link being referenced in many places – and locating the letters in the wiki, and expressed that the wiki wasn’t user friendly.
- [outcome: technology continued] Here’s a screenshot of the wiki page and what it looks like. The students would go to the wiki, find the letter in the list that the TA had assigned to them, pull it up, transcribe the letter either in one shot or, saving their work, over a period of time, and upload their transcription when finished. Once they were able to complete one transcription all the way through, some of the students felt comfortable enough with the process that they did more than the letter they were assigned. However, there seemed to be some substantial discomfort with the wiki right across the board at first. We are reviewing what we can do to make this easier for the next group of students doing transcriptions in this year’s class, but since we are limited to either this wiki or plugins and tools that work with Wordpress, our options I think are to provide more support earlier on in the process and not wait until students get bogged down in the workflow.
- [next steps: year 2] A new group of students in HIST 305 will continue to transcribe new letters. Last year’s class of 25 students got through 60 letters, which means that we have the capacity to continue this project for a few years yet. We don’t expect to be able to transcribe every single letter – some are quite illegible due to poor condition, but this will keep us going for a while. As well, with year 2 we will be starting a markup project using the letters for one of Laura’s 4th-year classes. They are intending to identify various commodities like for example how much butter was shipped to a certain shopkeeper over the course of a few years, or when condensed milk first made an appearance in the orders. Once enough of the letters have been translated we will have, I think, an interesting data set on the flow of goods in the area. Given the feedback from the last year about the wiki being difficult to navigate, we are going to have make some adjustments with regards to our expectations in this area.
- [what did we learn about DH?] We’ve talked a lot about what this project means for our future involvement in DH projects at the library. While that is still very much under discussion, there are some things that we have begun to realize. Capitalize on our skills: the Gold Rush Letters project started as a digitization project to make the material available online. Digitization is what we are very familiar and comfortable with doing and it made sense that a DH project would grow out of this. The project also had deeply pedagogical origins. We already had an established relationship with the History department prof who is invested in using library, archival and special collections for teaching and learning – that was the next little step for us. Identify incremental steps: The next step will be markup and text encoding. It’s our first markup project so we will be starting slow, doing entry-level tagging on a very basic level using the most low-barrier method that we can find. This way we have space to determine the processes and what works for us before we embark on ie a huge TEI project. Be realistic about what we can support: It’s tempting to jump right in and want to do everything all at once and try to deliver one big sparkly magical DH project. I don’t think we’re the only library who looks at institutions with established DH centres and feels the urge to try to emulate them from the start, to do everything all at once without gaining hard experience in the various components.
- [DH environmental scan] That brings me to something else I wanted to mention quickly. Susan Atkey, a HSS librarian at UBC, and myself are currently supervising a library school student, Stephanie Savage, to undertake an environmental scan of digital humanities activities at UBC and to develop a survey for UBC faculty on digital humanities activities. We hope to be able to identify DH projects already underway at UBC, and to get a sense of how other libraries support DH projects at their institutions in the hopes of determining what sort of DH support from the library is needed and wanted at UBC.
- The scan is currently underway; one thing that we know is that since there is no one central place at UBC doing DH it is hard to pinpoint Even though scholars, students and researchers are doing work that puts them squarely within the DH realm, they don’t necessarily identify as such; this makes it difficult to locate and identify DH projects. This brings up the ubiquitous question of “what is DH”? Moving forward with the survey, we will have to find a way identify those who are doing DH but don’t realize it