A researcher presenting a project at CDH’s open house last year
Last spring, my friend, now alum, told me she was going to study Digital Humanities at Stanford in the fall. This was the first time I heard of the field. She had discovered it through the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) at Princeton, an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to embracing technology as a way to understand the human experience. I spoke with Jean Bauer, Associate Director for CDH at Princeton, to see what this seemingly contradictory field was all about, and how students can engage with it.
Elise Freeman: For people who aren’t familiar with the field, can you give an explanation of what Digital Humanities is?
Jean Bauer: Digital Humanities is an international community of scholars who are interested in one of two things, or both of them. One way to get into Digital Humanities (DH) is to look at the record of the human experience and put that in conversation with digital computational methodologies that are being developed primarily but not exclusively in Computer Science. Think of things like network analysis, geospatial analysis, and data visualization and see what new questions you can ask of those sources and if there are any older questions that you can get a little more purchase on. That’s one kind of DH. The other kind is taking the training that we get as humanities scholars and using it to critique current technology and the ways in which it does or doesn’t account for things like disability, queer identity, race and other factors.
For me, and for most other Princeton students, a thesis is the longest thing you’ll have written at this point in your life, a particularly daunting task. No matter what happens, there’s no reason to panic or despair about the task at hand. Take a deep breath — everything will turn out fine.
I enrolled in GEO/WRI 201, Measuring Climate Change: Methods in Data Analysis & Scientific Writing, last Fall to challenge myself and learn how to integrate field work, scientific analysis, and writing. Although I already had cursory experience in these areas thanks to a Freshman Seminar on Biogeochemistry in the Everglades and a summer of assisting ecological fieldwork in Mozambique, I had never created and executed my own field project from start to finish. In my naiveté, I presumed that although the course would be difficult, I would conduct research that had a clear and established “finish-line”—and that I would reach it.
My project centered around quantifying changes in vegetation cover in Utah over the past twenty years using satellite imagery. The first couple months of the class were frustrating and I floundered across the deadlines. Most of the science courses I had taken offered a framework: a set of given questions with specific, correct answers. In real research, I found, you must create the questions—and they don’t necessarily have “correct” answers.
Successful research is based on convincing motive that builds off of key literature to contextualize and explain the broader importance of a specific research question.
The Author takes a GPS reading in Spanish Fork Utah. Unfortunately, the field work never even made it into the paper…
Despite my struggles, the project seemed to be coming along. Using images from multiple Landsat satellites, I created a beautiful figure showing a steep decline in vegetation tightly correlated with rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall. Genuine results linking changing climate to remotely sensed vegetation! I was thrilled.
However, after weeks of writing and data analysis, I discovered that the seemingly important trends I was writing about were–to put it bluntly–garbage. In a peer review session, another student in the class hypothesized that the apparent decline in vegetation might be simply an artifact of comparing imagery from different Landsat satellites. I scoffed–but I also started to worry.
The loop around Poe Field and through Icahn Laboratory makes an excellent walking path, day or night.
It’s a typical Monday night in J Street. All around me, students are hunched over notebooks and pecking at laptops. Faces are neutral, if not grim, betraying the anxieties of the week ahead. In the midst of the bustle of Princeton life, it’s all too easy to let this— “the grind”—become the uninterrupted norm. I often wonder, though, is this truly what’s best for our personal and academic development in the long run?
As classes begin, textbooks are purchased and suitcases are finally (mostly) unpacked, it’s safe to say that the new school year is officially upon us. Here at PCUR, we have a number of reasons to be thrilled about the upcoming semesters. For one, Elise, Taylor and I are being joined by six new correspondents from across class years and disciplines. You can read more about them on the Correspondents page, but here is a quick snapshot of our newest team members.
The 2017-2018 PCUR team back on campus and ready for the year ahead!
In our spring series, Senior Theses: A Celebration, we take a moment in the interlude between thesis deadlines and graduation to appreciate the diverse, personal, and impactful work of seniors’ capstone research projects.
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Xuewei Ouyang, a senior from New Jersey
Xuewei Ouyang is a senior in the Computer Science Department. For her thesis, she combined her passion for dance and her knowledge of coding to create an app called, ChoreoSpot. Here’s what she had to say about her work:
What is your thesis about?
In short, my thesis is about creating an app that takes a rehearsal video and, within various frames of the video, spots errors on the dancers’ bodies in comparison to the choreographer’s.
In our spring series, Senior Theses: A Celebration, we take a moment in the interlude between thesis deadlines and graduation to appreciate the diverse, personal, and impactful work of seniors’ capstone research projects.
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For her senior thesis in History, Nadia Diamond wrote about the Magdalen laundries in the Republic of Ireland.
Established at Catholic convents in the 18th century, Magdalen laundries were “rehabilitative” asylums, where sex workers and “fallen women” were put to work cleaning clothes. With the establishment of the Republic in 1922, the laundries lost their rehabilitative nature, and transformed into a form of slave-like punishment for “sinful” women, most of whom were not sex workers, but instead unmarried mothers, sexual assault survivors, or sexually active single women who had been ostracized by their communities. The women worked long hours under supervision of the nuns to wash people’s laundry, without financial compensation, and without freedom to exit the institution. The last of these laundries finally closed in 1996. In her thesis, Nadia focuses on three different laundries — in Dublin, Limerick, and Galway. She explores themes of community disengagement and considers the power that art can play in grappling with this horrific history.
Former Magdalen laundry run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity on Sean McDermott Street in Dublin.
What did you want to learn from this project?
The question that sparked my research was: Why did it take so long for the laywomen who had once been incarcerated to start having their voices heard, and for there to actually be some heat put on the state, the church, and larger society for letting this happen for so long? To do that I decided to look at newspaper archives and trace public discussion in search for any reference of the laundries throughout the 20th century in order to provide historical background for the general societal silence in the 21st century. The laundries were mentioned a lot, but it was all pro-Church, with no voice given to the women inside.
What led you to this topic?
In the summer after my freshman year, I took a global seminar called Performing Irishness, taught by professors Jill Dolan and Stacy Wolf. We were looking at Irish theater as a form of commentary and a method for processing and developing Irish identity. One of the productions we learned about was called Laundry. It was performed in 2011 in the dilapidated laundry in Dublin. The director, who I interviewed this summer, said there were still pieces of furniture, high chairs and things in the building, because it was the last of the laundries to close in 1996. She said it was “as if they just got up and left.” And the artists used these found objects in addition to oral histories to develop performance pieces. Learning about this, I was blown away.
Then Junior Spring an Irish journalist, Fintan O’Toole, taught a seminar called The Arts, Literature, and Cinema of Coercive Confinement in Modern Island, in which we talked about the laundries and other institutions, like mental asylums and industrial schools where kids were sent. We discussed how arts and literature could wrestle with the experiences of an individual and of the greater community.
Did you complete any previous projects about this topic?
I wrote my spring semester JP on a documentary called States of Fear, about the industrial schools where children were forced into labor, which featured survivor testimony and gave me good background. For my thesis I realized I wanted to focus back on the women. Because this documentary came out about the industrial schools and the government put out a 2500 page report specifically about state involvement in the industrial school system that were run by the Catholic religious orders, they collected testimonials, and started a system of reparations for people who had suffered abuse. But that didn’t happen with the Magdalen laundries. There was a report that came out that didn’t address any survivor testimonies, that said that none of the religious orders made any profit, which archivists and historians and activists who have investigated records say is not true.
In our spring series, Senior Theses: A Celebration, we take a moment in the interlude between thesis deadlines and graduation to appreciate the diverse, personal, and impactful work of seniors’ capstone research projects.
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Claire Ashmead completed two theses this spring: for her History concentration, a comparative study of McCarthyism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and, for her Creative Writing certificate, a novella entitled The Camel-Hair Coat. Here she reflects on writing and revising, family and loss, and the completion of her first book.
“Any creative product is more bound up with your soul than an academic product. My creative writing thesis is about my relationship with the women in my family, my relationship with space itself.”
What is your novella, The Camel-Hair Coat, about? It follows a girl, Daphne, who, four years ago, under mysterious circumstances, lost her mother in a terrible accident. Her intense grief over her mother’s death and profound yearning to know why her mother was taken away from her summons the ghost of her mother back from the dead. Daphne is faced with this choice: she can bring her mother back to reality, which she has wanted more desperately than she’s ever wanted anything before, but with terrible consequences for the rest of her family – her sister and grandmother. The price of bringing somebody back might be the exchange of other people you love, and even yourself. But if you really miss somebody – what wouldn’t you do?
How would you distill the book’s themes into a few words? Grief, wishes, and growing up.
What was the hardest part of writing the book? How much I had to revise. The book underwent a dramatic transformation, in part because I had two advisers: Joyce Carol Oates in the fall and then Jeffrey Eugenides in the spring. They’re completely different writers, which for me I think ended up being great: Joyce Carol Oates really tries to pull your creativity out of you, and she encouraged me to envision an alternative reality that ended up being a little confusing. Jeffrey Eugenides, on the other hand, is a very linear storyteller. When I gave him my draft, he told me he didn’t really understand what was going on, and that I needed to rewrite.
It was February, and I was hearing from my adviser that the 140 pages I’d generated needed to go. But in another sense that actually felt great.
At first that was very scary. It was February, and I was hearing from my adviser that the 140 pages I’d generated needed to go. But in another sense that actually felt great. I’d had the sneaking suspicion that the story needed a major change, and I wasn’t sure in what way. So I decided to structure it like a four-act play, where each act takes place in one day of one season. Once I had that structure, it was like, bingo! I know how this is going to develop.
In the second writing, I only kept maybe 3% of the words I’d previously written. But because I’d already created the spaces and characters in my head, writing the story the second time around actually took almost no effort, and required much less editing.
How did you juggle writing two separate theses? It was all about time management. I also really believe that just getting words on a page is so crucial. Often people feel like writing needs to be perfect when it comes out onto the page. My experience writing for Princeton Triangle Club has taught me that actually the hardest part is just starting, and as soon as you begin to write, your thoughts become clearer.
Also, the processes of the two theses were very different, which was helpful – if they were the same it probably would’ve been much more difficult for me to do the two. For my creative thesis, I wrote almost every day. With creative writing, I want to explore characters and change dialogue, so the earlier I get it out, the better. In history, it’s a very different beast: I like getting all of my secondary source reading and research done, getting it all into my head, and then putting it out onto the page. I would research for months and months, and then sit down and write a chapter in a day or two.
Describe your happy place as a writer. I have a two-room single in Edwards, so I have a room with my bed, and then another with a desk, facing the window. I wake up early, at 6 or 7 a.m., and would either go for a run or just go get coffee at Rojo’s, and then come to my desk in my little monastic sanctuary and write.
Claire in the “monastic sanctuary” where she drafted her thesis by hand. “I don’t like writing on lined paper,” she told me. “It’s art – I mean, you wouldn’t draw on lined paper, right? You might want to go off in any direction!”
The first time I write something, I write in pen, by hand, on blank sheets of unlined paper. The great thing about writing by hand is that it’s physically exhausting, so you only say what you need to say, and the words you pick are more exact and intentional.
I’d sit down and write for about an hour and a half every morning, which would be about five double-spaced typed pages, sometimes more. The first sentence can sometimes be difficult, but as you start writing, you reenter the world. It’s like learning to ride a bike: you remember it, and you just push forward on the momentum of describing the scene.
The first sentence can sometimes be difficult, but as you start writing, you reenter the world. It’s like learning to ride a bike: you remember it, and you just push forward on the momentum of describing the scene.
Do you have a favorite section of the book? A lot of the book was plot that I just had to get through, and then there were a few scenes that made me feel that they were exactly why I wrote the book. Here are two paragraphs, after Daphne’s mother has come back and she is able to speak with her mother again.
Her mother took her hands. “At least you’ll have your father to walk you down the aisle. Mine was gone by the time I was your age. I missed him so much.”
“What’s it like?” Daphne asked. “Missing somebody?”
“You know, I’ve never thought about it.” Her mother frowned. “I’d say missing somebody is like remembering to pick up milk at the grocery store. Most of the time, you don’t think about it at all. And then all of a sudden the thought will just occur to you. I’ve got to pick up milk at the grocery store. And the thought will occur to you once a week, every month, every year, for forever. I’ve got to pick up milk at the grocery store. There, that’s it. I think about my father every day.”
If you’d like to read more of The Camel-Hair Coat, you can find it archived – with all senior theses – on the senior thesis digital archive, where it will be available starting after graduation on June 6th, 2017.
When you’re about to graduate, you spend a lot of time thinking about the future. But you also spend a lot of time thinking about the past.
Metaphorical steps were climbed in the journey that inspired this post. Literal steps were climbed to get pictures for it.
Often, this can slip into abstract nostalgia (which I am certainly guilty of). Other times, however, this is focused on something oddly specific. Something you spent a lot of time on. Something like … well, PCUR.
Over the past few days, I’ve thought a lot about the posts I’ve written since my sophomore year. I figured it would be fun to retrace my research journey with the benefit of hindsight.
In our spring series, Senior Theses: A Celebration, we take a moment in the interlude between thesis deadlines and graduation to appreciate the diverse, personal, and impactful work of seniors’ capstone research projects.
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Alex Ford, a senior from Los Angeles
On Thursday, April 20th, the University Student Government presented Zanmim, a short film by Alex Ford ’17 who is a concentrator in Sociology and has a certificate in film studies. After completing both of his theses (a film and a research paper on Haiti), Alex agreed to sit down with PCUR to talk more about his work. Here’s what he had to say: Continue reading Celebrating Senior Theses: An interview with Alex Ford ’17
