Hello, my
Name is Maggie Rickman and this is my UCARE project for the academic year 2020
to 2021.
I'm a junior English and anthropology double major with minors in film studies
and digital humanities from clay center, Nebraska at UNL.
I'm a part of Anthrogroup, the DailyER, Laurus,
the English student advisory board and the writing center.
My studies and other involvements allow me to interact with humanities topics
from several perspectives making for a holistic comprehension of my fields.
Additionally,
the opportunity to do UCARE has given me the opportunity to carry out research in the Willa
Cather archive and has combined my values of accessibility context and visual
incorporation into multidisciplinary and multicultural spaces.
I have been working on my projects since September 2020,
and I hope to continue into my senior year after returning from my study abroad
experience in the fall.
My work in the Willa Cather archive is specialized in image gallery due to
the circumstances of the pandemic and the necessity to work remotely.
The research is part of the larger project titled The Complete Letters of Willa
Cather,
which aims to further the progress of the ongoing digital and scholarly
collection of previously inaccessible correspondence,
complementary bio annotations, and the image gallery.
This project digitally brings together thousands of documents scattered in
nearly 100 repositories around the world and has been possible through
cooperation of libraries, foundations,
and collections across the U.S. with the letters of you, of Willa Catherine,
previously,
unknown to readers and scholars is revealed as she is now visible and
unpublished more personal language. The backdrop of family, friendship,
partnership,
and other written interactions of her life lend more understandings of her,
her published works and therefore support the wide scholarships surrounding
them.
The image
Gallery specifically consists of photographs with various collections,
including those in the national Willa Cather foundation,
historical societies, the archive and family albums.
There are scans of black and white photographs, backs of photographs, postcards,
artwork, et. cetera,
in accordance with the established goals of The Complete Letters of Willa
Cather Project,
I have collaborated with the team and in our frequent zoom meetings,
We ask and answer questions, discuss progress, and support each other's work.
The specific goals of the image gallery work are to increase accessibility
through consistent labeling, coherent organization, and captions that offer
digestible context for various readers.
Therefore viewers with limited knowledge of Willa Cather's world,
or those with visual impairments, for example,
can have access to descriptions that clear the air regarding subject location
and other aspects of identification.
My methodology includes utilizing Google documents and spreadsheets to track my
work as well as mark questions or issues that arise.
The image gallery editing itself takes place in Luna, an online application
connected to the image database through categories like subject and direct
object identifiers,
which are the numbers attached to the photographs. So far in my research,
I edited the entirety of the subject line so that each person,
and there are hundreds can be found in the same place through searches.
This process involves reordering how the individual is listed,
including information such as birth dates, death dates, nicknames,
and maiden names.
I have also had to identify unknown subjects by referencing the existing bio
annotations, ancestry websites, and team members who are catheter scholars.
As for the descriptions,
I found that the main issues are ambiguity,
vagueness, and accuracies.
So far I described over 230 photographs,
which includes writing up and revising three to four sentence passages that
contextualize the visual aspects of the images.
And majority of those photos are portraits landscapes, event photographs,
et cetera.
An unexpected result of the project is the prompting of conversations about
social and political climates regarding race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality,
and the oppressive systems surrounding the vulnerable identities and the groups.
For example, I shared photos during meetings that feature nameless
American Indians, blackface,
and other controversial topics through the contemporary lens.
I've also asked questions concerning how I name vulnerable groups,
what aspects of the photograph to address and how to categorize iconography
historically harmful for groups. In the end, we question,
how much can we leave up to the reader?
The space of our meetings does not have a hierarchical model, though
Cather experts and my advisors, which are my superiors, are present.
We are able to talk through issues together,
combining our perspectives to gauge
what would be the best approach for online readers.
The environment of our project allows me to apply conceptual ideas
I've learned in my coursework to contribute to a productive dialogue,
as well as take away the insights of others,
whether from these types of discussions or tangents,
I can genuinely say that I learn something new every day. In addition,
there is a community outside of work as just last Friday,
I was able to attend most of Melissa J. Homestead's,
who is one of the members of our team, book release
about, um, the creative partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis
And it's amazing that, um,
I get to have insights into her work,
both in the Willa Cather archive and her personal work with writing this book.
This experience has been valuable for my current education and future academic
goals. And I'm confident that continuing my involvement will lead to even more
enriching interactions with my team, the image gallery and Cather's texts.
I hope that I will be able to be trained on the encoding process and other
aspects of the project
as we move from online back to in-person procedure in the coming months.
This is a multifaceted study, and it is gratifying to know that my work is making
it more accessible for audiences to consume and pursue projects of their own
relating to Cather. After I graduate next spring and continue onto
grads graduate school and or education opportunities such as Fulbright,
I hope to incorporate digital humanities discourse into my curriculums to
enhance my and other's learning. Projects
like the complete letters of Willa Cather opened up educational doors that
provide context and multiple forms, sending a message that a photo,
cannot speak a thousand words without knowing who captured it and why,
what they included and excluded, and the identities of the subjects. Similarly,
even though letters can speak a thousand words
literally, they still need the context in their own right.
And I want to send a big, big, big thank you to my advisors, Andy jewel,
and Emily Rau for their guidance and support my colleagues, Shea, Paul,
and Jamison for the opportunity to learn outside of my work,
Melissa Homestead and Kari for their endless Cather knowledge, and lastly,
the UCARE program for the opportunity in research in the humanities.
I owe a lot to you guys for granting me this continued opportunity and
humanities research and recognizing that we have
viable questions and subsequent conversations to pursue.
Thank you.