Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
add issue intro; change issue title
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
gwijthoff committed Dec 19, 2024
1 parent f565fe9 commit a5b6cac
Showing 1 changed file with 8 additions and 11 deletions.
19 changes: 8 additions & 11 deletions content/issues/5/_index.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -3,31 +3,28 @@ type: issue
layout: single
title: Issue 5
number: 5
theme: JOURNEYS
theme_wrap_width: 10rem
theme: PROCESSES
theme_wrap_width: 12rem
# Unless the publish date is before today's date, hugo won't publish it.
date: 2024-09-29 # Change me
date: 2024-12-18 # Change me
slug: 5
num_features: 3
summary: This issue features the work of three leading graduate students at the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities.
# author(s) of issue introduction as a slug drawn from data/authors.yml
authors:
- WythoffGrant
# editorial staff and any development & design contributors for this issue
contributors:
- Editor:
- Grant Wythoff
- Manuscript Editing:
- Camey Van Sant
---

This issue of *Startwords* features the work of three leading graduate students from the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton. While their work spans disciplines and historical periods, these scholars all use data curation and visualization to highlight the importance of everyday, historical people whose lives may otherwise have remained unknown to us: non-elites in early modern South Asia, nineteenth-century African students attending US universities, and craftspeople who aided the work of sculptors in the Renaissance.

This issue of *Startwords* features the work of three leading graduate students at the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities. Lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Malesuada ultrices ac sodales laoreet consectetur aliquam mauris magna. Interdum parturient pretium odio purus egestas egestas laoreet conubia. Interdum euismod diam sagittis sagittis leo quam pulvinar ante. Volutpat aenean convallis euismod platea leo interdum quis. Consectetur velit sed habitasse litora ipsum dui. Tristique ac varius eu himenaeos praesent ex; efficitur ac. Convallis dui potenti proin sem taciti fermentum consectetur.
In “Casting in Reverse,” art historian Sharifa Lookman writes of Antonio Susini, studio assistant to famous Renaissance sculptors. For technicians working in bronze, like Susini, “in order to achieve the height of their craft, they must erase all traces of their labor.” In her remarkable work, Lookman reverse engineers these labors through 3D scanning, photogrammetry, and an internship with a local metal foundry “to understand the intricacies of casting, from wax to bronze.” At times, these digital and analog processes inflect one another, as they do when Lookman uses casting wax to secure a sculpture to the base of a 3D scanner. Lookman aims in her dissertation to rewrite the history of art as a history of process. But she herself fully engages with these artistic processes in order to better understand them.

Lacinia luctus pretium sit pretium facilisi. Luctus nostra erat imperdiet molestie montes sollicitudin ultricies malesuada. Luctus urna rutrum eget amet ultricies dolor enim. Feugiat neque suscipit iaculis at cursus nulla mus pretium. Torquent dis posuere sociosqu himenaeos libero habitant purus auctor cubilia. Mollis torquent blandit varius penatibus magna vulputate morbi orci.
Religion scholar Kimberly Akano in “Visualizing African Student Mobility” traces the migrations of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century students from Africa to historically Black colleges and universities in the United States. Akano draws on Kim Gallon in hoping that her dataset can “be used as a ‘technology of recovery’ to begin unearthing the narratives of African students.” At the center of Akano’s work is an extraordinary collection of index cards maintained by Horace Mann Bond---a midcentury leader at Atlanta and Lincoln Universities---that records the names, origins and destinations, areas of study, and eventual occupation of these students over more than a century. Bond’s goal was “to demonstrate the underappreciated role of HBCUs in educating West African leaders such as Nnamdi Azikiwe (later the first president of Nigeria) and Kwame Nkrumah (the first president of Ghana).” But Akano takes this handmade dataset and uses it to map hundreds of lesser-known students’ journeys.

Vulputate orci eros laoreet elementum bibendum. Metus tortor leo etiam ipsum facilisi. Convallis dui arcu orci netus condimentum lectus. Quis ac libero vel fames sapien. Habitasse arcu sit inceptos accumsan turpis penatibus porta faucibus? Varius inceptos nisl laoreet bibendum sapien fringilla maximus mattis ullamcorper. Taciti potenti malesuada; molestie habitant nam fames. Pellentesque enim aliquet potenti porta proin nullam metus integer eget. Sagittis in viverra mollis dapibus pellentesque dui cras et fringilla.
Finally, in “Mapping Persian Literacy in Early Modern South Asia,” historian Hasan Hameed grapples with archival silences in a region “where two centuries of British colonialism systematically distorted local libraries, archives, and collective memory.” Hameed’s article tracks the spread and influence of the *Gulistan* (Rose-Garden), a Persian poem composed in the mid-thirteenth century that educators used for centuries to “teach students how to behave and how to appreciate language.” Though a countless number of these manuscripts have been lost over time to “wind, water, and worms,” as Hameed puts it, the hundreds that remain speak to a remarkable spread of Persian literacy in early modern India among everyday people, “beyond courtly elites.” Through his maps, Hameed shows how this Islamic text circulated among Sikh and Hindu communities, traveling thousands of miles from Southern India all the way to present-day Western Afghanistan.

Litora urna aenean non netus amet. Scelerisque dolor duis lacus facilisi risus porta sapien. Ultricies aenean in augue varius sociosqu fusce. Porta arcu per bibendum eget nostra vitae fermentum. Eu torquent rutrum eros praesent tempus dignissim non nisi. In leo iaculis eget torquent dictumst platea.

Congue magna himenaeos platea dui pellentesque tempor leo, maximus sagittis. Fames aenean condimentum vivamus purus nostra mollis vulputate nulla. Senectus vitae placerat hac mi habitant conubia. Maecenas facilisi rutrum nam viverra elit donec pellentesque iaculis. Sed parturient nulla lacus gravida pulvinar sollicitudin. Nibh praesent viverra consectetur; lacinia erat tristique magna. Lectus nisi ad nostra rutrum inceptos commodo leo.
All three contributors here reflect on method in digital humanities, each concluding that these methods are primarily valuable not in their ability to prove something incontrovertibly but rather as tools for thought. For Akano, “the process of creating the digital products was itself a practice of scholarly interpretation.” Hameed writes that in cleaning hundreds of bibliographic records, he realized any one of those records can “reveal an entire world of knowledge production and transmission.” And Lookman curated a dataset that led her to find “unnoticed patterns and trends . . . filling the gaps in what we can know.” Far from automating scholarly labor, these practices, methods, and processes in DH demand additional thought and reflection.

0 comments on commit a5b6cac

Please sign in to comment.