This project draws upon material culture, digital humanities, and archival theory and method in the service of public history investigations. After selecting an artifact and performing object analysis, I will digitize the artifact and materialize a new object. I will then perform another object analysis on the 3D printed object. This exercise will provide the familiar benefits of object analysis, but the decisions and interactions necessary to digitize and materialize the object provide a fresh perspective. I will propose approaches for performing similar investigations in repositories, along with a pedagogical argument for doing so. By emphasizing modularity, flexibility, and minimal capital requirements, I hope these approaches can be adapted to a variety of institutions and audiences. Researchers will reap the benefits of intellectual and emotional engagement, hands-on learning, and technological experimentation. Public historians will have the opportunity to engage in outreach and innovative education and exploration of their collections. / History

This thesis explores the use and potential of digital timelines in public history projects. Digital timelines have become a popular and accessible ways for institutions and individuals to write history. The history of timelines indicates that people understand timelines as authoritative information visualizations because they represent concrete events in absolute time. The goals of public history often conflict with the linear, progressive nature of most timelines. This thesis reviews various digital timeline tools and uses The Print Center's Centennial Timeline as an in-depth case study that takes into account the multifaceted factors involved in creating a digital timeline. Digital history advocates support digital scholarship as an alternative to traditional narrative writing. This thesis illustrates that digital timelines can enable people to visualize history in unexpected ways, fostering new arguments and creative storytelling. Despite their potential, digital timelines often replicate the conventions of their paper counterparts because of the authoritative nature of the timeline form. / History

Transgender lives and identities have gained considerable popular notoriety in the past decades. As part of this wider visibility, dominant narratives regarding the “transgender experience” have surfaced in both the community itself and the wider public. Perhaps the most prominent of these narratives define transgender people as those living in the “wrong body” for their true gender identity. While a popular and powerful story, the wrong body narrative has been criticized as limited, not representing the experience of all transgender people, and valorized as the only legitimate identifier of transgender status. The dominance of this narrative has been challenged through the proliferation of alternate narratives of transgender identity, largely through transgender people telling their own stories, which has the potential to complicate and expand the social understanding of what it means to be transgender for both trans- and cisgender communities. I focus on transgender literature as a point of entrance into the changing narratives of transgender identity and experience. This work addresses two main questions: What are the stories being told by trans lit? and What are the stories being told about trans literature? What follows is a series of separate, yet linked chapters exploring the contours of transgender literature, largely through the context of the Lambda Literary Awards over the past twenty years. Chapter 2 explores the changing definitions of transgender literature in popular discourse over the last two decades. Drawing on a data set of 51 articles, interviews, book reviews, and blog posts published from 1997-2017, I present a framework for defining and categorizing transgender literature. This framework lays out the different possibilities of what transgender literature might be using the three variables of content, authorship, audience, as well as the likelihood of each iteration being included in the definition of transgender literature as understood in the popular conversation. My findings in this chapter suggest a changing definition of transgender literature from “telling transgender/transition stories” to a focus on “transgender people telling stories.” Chapter 3 moves from conversations defining trans literature to an exploration of how texts within transgender literature have changed over time. Using the finalist and winners in the Lambda Literary Award transgender categories, I constructed a sample of transgender literature covering the past two decades, from 1997-2016. Using digital textual analysis methods, I identify various “demographic” trends in transgender literature since 1997, which mirror the trend identified in chapter 3, a shift from “telling transgender stories” focused largely on identity and transition processes to “transgender people telling stories” which rely much less on transition and identity as central themes. Chapter 4 attempts to contextualize these shifts identified in chapters 2 and 3 by situating trans literature in a broader socio-historical context. I frame transgender literature as an intellectual movement situated in an intellectual opportunity structure that includes the publishing industry, LGBT social activism and organizations, and the Lambda Literary Awards themselves. Lambda Literary functions here as a primary gatekeeper for understanding transgender literature in a broader intellectual community around LGBT cultural production, which transitions us to thinking more critically about the Lambda Literary Awards in chapter 5. Chapter 5 introduces us more fully to the Lambda Literary Awards, the largest LGBT book awards in North America, and positions them as a claim for LGBT cultural citizenship in the United States. Using archival documents from the Lambda Literary Foundation, as well as published statements and articles about the Lambda Literary Awards, I explore three conflicts and controversies within the LGBT community through the localized claims for cultural citizenship made on the Lammys. Finally, I provide a brief conclusion, which recaps the main findings of each chapter, sketches my tentative hopes for the future of transgender literature, and outlines my recommendations for future research in this area. / Sociology

Although digital humanities (DH) has received a lot of attention in recentyears, its status as “a discipline in its own right” (Schreibman et al., A companion to digital humanities (pp. xxiii–xxvii). Blackwell; 2004) and its position inthe overall academic landscape are still being negotiated. While there arecountless essays and opinion pieces that debate the status of DH, little researchhas been dedicated to exploring the field in a systematic and empirical way (Poole, Journal of Documentation; 2017:73). This study aims to contribute tothe existing research gap by comparing articles published over the past threedecades in three established English-language DH journals (Computers andthe Humanities, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Digital Humanities Quar-terly) with research articles from journals in 15 other academic disciplines (corpus size: 34,041 articles; 299 million tokens). As a method of analysis, weuse latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling, combined with recentapproaches that aggregate topic models by means of hierarchical agglomera-tive clustering. Our findings indicate that DH is simultaneously a discipline inits own right and a highly interdisciplinary field, with many connecting factorsto neighboring disciplines—first and foremost, computational linguistics, andinformation science. Detailed descriptive analyses shed some light on the dia-chronic development of DH and also highlight topics that are characteristicfor DH.

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This work sets out to analyze stylistic changes in Anthropocene fiction over the past 60 years. The starting point for the analysis has been Rachel Carson, and the presumed beginning of the Anthropocene in the 1960s. The primary insight gained reveals the connections within these novel and relations of similar writing about climate change thereby contributing to the field of Environmental Humanities in a fundamental way, as so far, climate change fiction has only been investigated through a topic centered focus. The corpus compiled for scrutiny here extends to over 84 novels from these years. These novels have been selected based on a dual approach, looking at the secondary literature as well as a crowdsourced approach in looking at Good Reads’ cli-fi lists. The resulting texts are then analyzed with stylo, an R package that has been specifically created for stylometric analysis by humanists. The results are visualized in a network that allows easier interpretation and leads to an understanding of more detailed questions about the nature of the connection between works, the inspiration and representation of a specific genre of writing. Moreover, the thesis looks diachronically at clustering based on time and topic. Understanding the ways in which authors address and have addressed climate change is one indicator of how climate change is and has been comprehended. In terms of the digital approach applied here, the basis is a distant reading approach covering a larger number of novels and rather than close reading them, the task is to find patterns that extend throughout. However, for a thorough analysis, scalable reading is applied to contextualize and investigate the results in more depth. Overall, the results are meant to establish a baseline for discussing climate change fiction in the Anthropocene which although gaining more scholarly attention still is understudied. The hope is to not only gain insight but to generate visualizations that will provide a helpful resource for fellow scholars.

The Catherine Byron Letters is an edited and annotated collection of letters mostly exchanged between Catherine Byron, the mother of the poet, and her solicitor John Hanson. The importance of this correspondence was first established by Doris Langley-Moore in Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered (1974), which documents the poet's finances from the time of his birth. Since then the letters have been used extensively by Megan Boyes in My Amiable Mamma: A Biography of Mrs. Catherine Gordon Byron (1991) and by J. V. Beckett and Sheila Aley in Byron and Newstead: The Aristocrat and the Abbey (2001). For this project I have transcribed and edited the portion of Catherine Byron's correspondence now in the John Murray Archives at the National Library of Scotland, amounting to 92 letters which are here reproduced in their entirety. While some are familiar letters, most of the correspondence is concerned with the business of providing for the young poet's education at Harrow and at Cambridge, paying off his mounting debts, managing the Newstead Abbey estate, and pursuing the lawsuits which entangled the family finances. I have edited the transcribed letters using the TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative) markup language, adding optional punctuation where necessary to clarify the sense as well as headnotes and additional annotations for personal names, places, and technical terms where they require elucidation. The resulting machine-readable XML documents have been made into a website on which I have collaborated with Professor Radcliffe. / Master of Arts

Identifying individuals in historical photographs is important for preserving material culture, correcting historical records, and adding economic value. Historians, antiques dealers, and collectors often rely on manual, time-consuming approaches. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers potential solutions, it's not widely adopted due to a lack of specialized tools and inherent inaccuracies and biases. In my dissertation, I address this gap by combining the complementary strengths of human intelligence and AI. I introduce Photo Sleuth, a novel person identification pipeline that combines crowdsourced expertise with facial recognition, supporting users in identifying unknown portraits from the American Civil War era (1861--65). Despite successfully identifying numerous unknown photos, users often face the `last-mile problem' --- selecting the correct match(es) from a shortlist of high-confidence facial recognition candidates while avoiding false positives. To assist experts, I developed Second Opinion, an online tool that employs a novel crowdsourcing workflow, inspired by cognitive psychology, effectively filtering out up to 75% of facial recognition's false positives. Yet, as AI models continually evolve, changes in the underlying model can potentially impact user experience in such crowd--expert--AI workflows. I conducted an online study to understand user perceptions of changes in facial recognition models, especially in the context of historical person identification. Our findings showed that while human-AI collaborations were effective in identifying photos, they also introduced false positives. To reduce these misidentifications, I built Photo Steward, an information stewardship architecture that employs a deliberative workflow for validating historical photo identifications. Building on this foundation, I introduced DoubleCheck, a quality assessment framework that combines community stewardship and comprehensive provenance information, for helping users accurately assess photo identification quality. Through my dissertation, I explore the design and deployment of human-AI collaborative tools, emphasizing the creation of sustainable online communities and workflows that foster accurate decision-making in the context of historical photo identification. / Doctor of Philosophy / Identifying historical photos offers significant cultural and economic value; however, the identification process can be complex and challenging due to factors like poor source material and limited research resources. In my dissertation, I address this problem by leveraging the complementary strengths of human intelligence and Artificial Intelligence (AI). I built Photo Sleuth, an online platform, that helps users in identifying unknown portraits from the American Civil War era. This platform employs a novel person identification workflow that combines crowdsourced human expertise and facial recognition. While AI-based facial recognition is effective at quickly scanning thousands of photos, it can sometimes present challenges. Specifically, it provides the human expert with a shortlist of highly similar-looking candidates from which the expert must discern the correct matches; I call this as the `last-mile problem' of person identification. To assist experts in navigating this challenge, I developed Second Opinion, a tool that employs a novel crowdsourcing workflow inspired by cognitive psychology, named seed-gather-analyze. Further, I conducted an online study to understand the influence of changes in the underlying facial recognition models on the downstream person identification tasks. While these tools enabled numerous successful identifications, they also occasionally led to misidentifications. To address this issue, I introduced Photo Steward, an information stewardship architecture that encourages deliberative decision-making while identifying photos. Building upon the principles of information stewardship and provenance, I then developed DoubleCheck, a quality assessment framework that presents pertinent information, aiding users in accurately evaluating the quality of historical photo IDs. Through my dissertation, I explore the design and deployment of human-AI collaborative tools, emphasizing the creation of sustainable online communities and workflows that encourage accurate decision-making in the context of historical photo identification.

In historical photo research, the presence of painted backdrops have the potential to help identify subjects, photographers, locations, and jl{events surrounding} certain photographs. Yet, research processes around these backdrops are poorly documented, with no known tools to aid in the task. We propose a four-step human-AI collaboration workflow to support the jl{discovery} and clustering of these backdrops. Focusing on the painted backdrops of the American Civil War (1861 -- 1865), we present Backdrop Explorer, a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system incorporating computer vision and novel user interactions. We evaluated Backdrop Explorer on nine users of diverse experience levels and found that all were able to effectively utilize Backdrop Explorer to find photos with similar backdrops. We also document current practices and pain points in Civil War backdrop research through user interviews. Finally, we discuss how our findings and workflow can be applied to other topics and domains. / Master of Science / In historical photo research, the presence of painted backdrops have the potential to help identify subjects, photographers, locations, and events surrounding certain photographs. Yet, research processes around these backdrops are poorly documented, with no known tools to aid in the largely manual task. We present Backdrop Explorer, a reverse image search system that helps users discover and subsequently group photos with similar backdrops. We evaluated the system and found that it effectively supported the tasks. We also document current practices and pain points in Civil War backdrop research. Finally, we discuss how our findings and system can be applied to other domains.

No description available.