Digital Frontiers

Micah Bateman, University of Texas at Austin



In this workshop, participants will install and learn the basics of TWARC, a Python script used to harvest and archive data from Twitter. Many disciplines use social media data. As a literary historian, I use Tweets featuring poems of resistance for reception studies. But only recent Tweets are easy to find using Twitter’s search ap- paratus, and Tweets are only archived for two years, making the public discourses of resistance movements ephemeral. TWARC makes it easier to search for and archive Twitter data given research parameters. The workshop will begin with an introduction to TWARC through my own research about archiving and preserving #BlackLivesMatter Tweets that intersect with quotations of Black radical poetry. We’ll also discuss the task of archiving Twitter, a task that even the Library of Congress has taken on and quit. Then I’ll walk participants through installing TWARC on Windows and Mac operating systems followed by a number of search exercises, including some directed toward participants’ own research needs. Bring your own Wifi-enabled laptop.

xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman, University of Texas at Dallas

“An Archive of Unnamed Women” is a browser-based digital archive juxtaposing nineteenth-century literature about women with photographs of unnamed or unidentified American women found in the collections of the New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Library of Congress. This re-presented archive accessed through a digitized library research station generates a dialog about female identity within libraries. In lieu of citation information, visitors who search our photography archive of unnamed women are presented with misinformation as descriptions drawn from a parallel collection of women’s writing about women. Together, the resulting imagined narratives relocate the women on the screen as subjects of literary examination. Blurring the lines between art and archive, this project furthers discourse about the library as an authority of knowledge curation and a site of creation. When visitors explore the database its perimeters are visible. This reveals the arbitrary nature of information preservation and highlights the constructed nature of digitized materials. We explore the stakes in preparing an archive while making space for self-generated narrative, all the while asking: What would it mean to move these unnamed women from anonymity, deep within the archive, to the center of the screen? Through a discussion of our project, participants will explore the political role of archives in emphasizing or hiding marginalized people. Moreover, we investigate archives as mechanisms for critical discussions about identity. Participants will search our archive, suggest additional source materials, and print their own “Un- named Woman” action-artifact on archival paper.

Zach Coble, New York University

As more and more primary and secondary source material appears on websites, it is becoming increasingly important for scholars and librarians to learn how to collect this material at scale. Participants in this workshop will learn how to create a textual corpus using web scraping techniques. We will begin with a discussion of why web scraping can be a useful technique (for analysis, archiving, etc.) as well as legal and ethical questions associated with scraping data. Using this discussion as our theo- retical foundation, we will then write a program together using Python’s Beautiful Soup library that scrapes textual data from websites. There are many types of websites and many types of data that can be gathered, so we will go through several examples so that participants learn strategies for scraping in a variety of contexts. Finally, once the data is gathered, we will perform a few additional steps to clean the data and prepare it for the next phase of analysis. By the end of the workshop, participants will be comfortable using a variety of web scraping tech- niques, and will be able to generate a corpus and to prepare it for further analysis. This workshop is open to all, including beginners. Bring your own Wifi-enabled laptop.

Spencer Keralis, Digital Frontiers

Melissa Gonzales, Houston Community College

District Internet-based self-publishing platforms offer an opportunity for almost anyone to share information on the web. In this workshop, participants will team up to work on an interactive timeline that integrates historical contexts with data and information literacy principles, and that requires minimal technical know-how. The end result is a fun, collaborative project that can enrich blogs or websites, and can easily be integrated into the classroom. This workshop offers librarians, genealogists, primary and secondary educators, local historians, faculty, and students a chance to explore hands-on digital scholarship. Beginners welcome. Bring your own Wifi-enabled laptop.