Author Archives: A Virtual Lisa

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week Fourteen — The Final Hurtle

“File:Ghost Hug chalk writing on Hawthorne during Coronavirus pandemic.jpg.” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository.

When I stood to write this final journal (yes, stood …I’ve worked at a standing desk for years), I struggled with how best to end this exercise in public journaling: would it be a final personal narrative, or a reflection on the project itself, or something more esoteric? In the end, I decided to focus on what I believe made the project a success, and that can be summed in one word: cohesion.

For people who have studied group dynamics, the effect of cohesiveness is key to productive outcomes. Teams generally develop in stages*:

Forming (emotions like excitement, questioning behaviors about a person’s place within the group, and task formation).
Storming (emotions like frustration when blockers begin to appear, arguments over direction can happen, and tasks need to be revised).
Performing (emotions like comfort and acceptance, communication improves, productivity improves).
Norming (emotions like satisfaction, fluidity between tasks and adjustments to support needs, skills improve and success is celebrated.
Adjourning (emotions like anxiety and loss, some members may increase their productivity while others step back, task closure and celebration).

Our group was tested several times along the way, and we had to move quickly from forming to storming. Our first test was when we realized we would need to radically rethink the initial proposal, as it had relied too heavily on the work of a single academic. The second was when we struggled with how to define our audience. If both cases, our ability to be speak openly and to listen mindfully allowed us to pivot gracefully. It was helpful that several of us had worked together before this class, so trust had already been established between some members of the group.

The ability to pivot and then to see the work grow from those decisions led us to reach farther. The creation of the Making Mapping Cemeteries site was driven by our desire to leave a roadmap to future scholars (DH practitioners being one of our audiences), and wanting to engage using different platforms led to the creation of the Mapping Cemeteries: After Life podcast series. While these choices did significantly increase the workload, they also forced us to stay continually engaged with each other via email, Zoom meetings and our Common’s community site.

We are now moving from norming to adjourning. Coming together to write our final group report [https://dhpraxis21.commons.gc.cuny.edu/mapping-cemeteries-final-project-report/] was bitter-sweet, since it so clearly signaled that our team in its current incarnation was drawing to a close. However, our last team meeting was also hopeful, in that we all expressed interest in staying connected to the project in some way and to coming together to finally meet “in the flesh” and do a group walk of our locations for a walking tour. Our class is over and our class deliverables to it have been met, but our relationships to each other will continue. That is what cohesion builds and I feel blessed!

*I am referencing Bruce Tuckman’s work here. Resource: https://infed.org/mobi/bruce-w-tuckman-forming-storming-norming-and-performing-in-groups/

Tom pursues the skeleton of Old Grindstone around the graveyard, c1857.

Due: 13 May 2021 (published 25 May 2021).

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week Thirteen — Talking in the Rain

Cross section drawing of a carbon button microphone|, 1916.

This week, in addition to work on the website, we had a new deliverable: an audio diary to be made at our cemetery location. Asma, our lead, gave clear direction:

“Record 15 minutes – 30 minutes of audio that capture sounds unique to your environment (the place of recording). Introduce your cemetery and later, the necropolitics that contextualize it. Conclude with remarks about your selection of data points that appear on MC’s Timeline and why it is important to you.”

At our weekly team meeting, I had pushed back. I was concerned that 15-to-30 minutes was too big an ask (both for us as makers and for our nascent audience of listeners), plus I was not sure that I could actually produce that much content! My team was, as they always are, supportive. “Do what you can.”

I went back to my working Word document …now some 100 pages of research and false starts …and read through it. Whenever I hit some copy that felt like it needed to be said, I highlighted it. When I got to the end, I had about twenty pages of content that began to read like a conversation. And that’s when it happened …that wonderful thing that sometimes does happen when you have been working and reworking text …the rewrite began to write itself.

It took about six hours to complete the script. [It was slowed by my also using that time to adjust the copy for my cemetery’s webpage.] I did a slow read, then edited it down. I did a second read, this time recording it, and listened back. More edits. I did a third read and now, listening back, it felt right!

All that Friday, I’d had the radio on in the background. At the top of the hour, the weather report changed every so slightly from “there will be rain”, to “there is a slight change of rain”, to “we are looking at clear skies tonight”. I emailed myself a copy of the script, paired my smartphone to an open-ear bluetooth headset, and headed out the door. The sun was shining as I walked up Broadway toward the Worth Monument.

Standing before the monolith, I was grateful for its relative isolation from any comforts (no benches where people might loiter and heavy traffic on its east and west sides). To record, I had to remove my mask. This was the first time in more than a year that I had gone, barefaced, in open air. It occurred to me that this was a public park and technically, masks were still required. I glanced around and the street-scape was devoid of NYPD; hopefully, this creative exercise would not end with a citation.

The first take was a challenge. When I listened back, it was forced and bit too breathless. The second take when well. And, toward the end the third take, those promised clear skies opened with a downpour for rain. Having not brought an umbrella, I ran across Broadway to crouch under the large overhang of an office building. Getting the mask back on was a process, given the now fogged glasses and non-intuitive headset. The tall man sheltering with me nodded as I gave my apologies. “I was watching you …were you having an argument with someone”? I laughed. “No, not all. I was recording something for school.”

Our conversation continued. I told him about the project. Played him back a bit of the recording. He worked in the neighborhood and, like me, had barely noticed the monument. While the rain lasted, we chatted about our Covid experience and the importance of parks. It was one of those lovely New York moments when you connect with a stranger. Once the rain cleared, he headed uptown and returned to the monument to complete the final take.

P.S. Our podcast network is being streamed on SoundCloud. Here’s the link: https://soundcloud.com/mappingcemeteries.

“File:Rain (3735431928).jpg.” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. 21 Sep 2020, 16:46 UTC. 13 May 2021, 22:15 <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Rain_(3735431928).jpg&oldid=467011541>.

Due date: 29 April 2021 (published in final form on 18 May 2021).

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week Twelve — Celebrating Collaboration

This last week has been focused on research. Yes, I’m still learning about my subject. It’s been challenging for me, putting my notes into a functional read. However, we now have an agreed visual mechanism we refer to as a “card.” Each card can support an image, several headers, and several paragraphs of copy. Example below. Knowing how the pages will visually organize themselves has given me what I need to organize the copy. It’s exhilarating.

Sample “card” from the City Hall cemetery page.

Yesterday, our weekly team meeting was devoted to recording our first podcast! It was lovely. Asma is our lead here and did a great job organizing it and facilitating the conversation. It was a review of our process to date, and she provided some excellent prompts several days before the event so that we could prepare ourselves.

Even though we are currently in the madness of creating, taking this time to reflect on why we chose this topic and what we’ve learned thus far had a calming effect for me. It was great to hear Bri engaging with their memories about how this project has evolved since their initial proposal. Asma shared a charming anecdote of how Bret acted as a kind of “sorting hat” to place her in our group when her browser stymied her ability to tap into that initial Zoom culling (and what a fortuitous choice it has turned out to be). lane explained why he chose his Cemetary (the African burial ground) because he is new to NYC and did not know about it before research began. Nadia was excited about the project when Bri first proposed it and was particularly inspired by the opportunity to craft a website from scratch. All of us have grown in our understanding of what “mapping” means, moving from a strictly cartographic comprehension to a deeper appreciation of how sharing histories can change our engagement with “points on a map.”

We have more podcasts planned. They will continue to document the work and do deeper dives into specific aspects of the project. These podcasts, coupled with our Making Mapping Cemeteries website, will do a fine job documenting our process. Given our core audience are scholars and students, mapping our process is as important as mapping our cemeteries.

We should start a podcast

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week Eleven — Fun with Images

Fun with Images

I have been moving between research that is reading and research that is visual. I’ve found several images of the Worth Memorial location which show the site in such a way that you can compare that historical reference to its current state. This is fascinating to me because it so clearly shows how the city has changed.

When the memorial was originally constructed, it dominated the landscape. This can be seen clearly in the lithograph below, which shows its 1857 dedication ceremony. Any buildings are far away, as the intersections between Broadway and Fifth Avenue merged at its base and the cobbled stone roadways were wide and deep, with Madison Park seemingly far in the distance.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library.

Ceremonies of the dedication of the Worth Monument. (Nov. 25, 1857), from The New York Public Library.

Some thirty years later, not much had changed. The area is still dominated by wide cobblestone streets, but now there are the metal tracks for the trolly lines, electric lines for arc lighting, and a posh hotel, build across from the monument itself.

Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library.

Madison Square: Edison Electric Arc Light, Worth Memorial, William Seward statue, Hotel Victoria. Circa 1884. From The New York Public Library/

However, by 1930 (the likely date of the stereograph below) Broadway had been narrowed and buildings constructed, hemming the monument in.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.

Worth Monument, South Front view. Circa 1930. From The New York Public Library.

Over time, the buildings have only grown in height until they dwarf Worth’s resting place. In the comparison below, you can see the 1930 view and the 2021 view, side-by-side, at almost the same angle. Without the sky, the monument is absorbed by the streetscape.

Comparison Photo Composite of Worth Square circa 1930 and circa 2021.

Worth Square as seen in 1850 and in 2021. The 1850 image comes from the New York Public Library’s digital collection.

These images are metaphors for the man’s memory. At his death, his memorial dominated the scene. But now, subsumed by the street-scape, it disappears from our view. And yet, it is still there if you have a mind to see it.

[A note for Bret: No matter what I do, I cannot get my photos to render properly. Something about this theme changes their aspect ratio. Can you correct this?]

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week Ten – Crunch Time Approaches

Crunch Time Approaches

Last week was Spring Break in CUNY-land and for the most part, our team agreed to honor it as an actual break. I think of this last week as the proverbial calm before the storm that is often the reality of birthing any kind of creative product. For myself, the timing was fortuitous as I received my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19 and it hit me pretty hard: for three days following the shot I was not in any shape to do research or concentrate on anything technical. But I’m doing fine now and have picked up my research and am moving forward.

I’ve decided to break my research on our war memorial into six sections:

An introduction to the project, as it relates to the Worth Memorial location.
Biographical information about General Worth’s life.
Information about the Worth Memorial itself, including its unveiling and how the city has changed around it since it was created.
Some thoughts on the memorial within the context of the project.
Conclusions from the research.
The Clio walking tour [tentative]

Allen and Ginter. “William Jenkins Worth Cigarettes Card.” Circa 1888. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public domain collection.

Sadly, the NYPL was unable to send me the two books I requested. No reason was given for the denial, though I suspect it is because they only have one copy of either on file. They are able to send photocopies of up to 50 pages from each. Without being able to see the books, it’s hard to direct them as to what pages to copy. Luckily, I was able to find Edward Wallace’s original 1948 dissertation (which later became the published biography) on the Boston University website. A digital PDF has been created from the document, including some notes from the professors who reviewed it … fascinating for this digital humanist to see. I have now read enough about Worth that I feel I can move from his life and on to why the memorial was created in New York City, and what it meant in the context of that time.

The research continues ….

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week 8 – More Research

This week was research and more research. Bret made me aware that the NYPL will send books to GC students, so I made a request for a copy of the Jenkins Worth biography and the planning report that the NYC Common Council created to commemorate the memorial. It can take up to three weeks for the request to be processed, so I am unsure I will be able to rely on getting it in time. However, it’s good to know that I will likely get it at some point.

We need to populate our website’s top navigation timeline with more data. My research focus for this week was on the broader history of New York City. Bri had already done super work recording some of the great moments in the NYC deathscape, like the fact the city banned burials below 14^th Street in 1839, or that the state allowed the purchase of tax-free land for cemeteries in 1847. I focused on demographics (for example, how huge surges in population growth affected culture) and infrastructure (how the opening of the Erie Canal gave NYC a direct water route to the content to the Midwest). In our team meeting tonight we agreed that we would need to winnow down the number of data points that we’ll use in the timeline, but that we’ll also want to memorialize the bulk of the content in another way.

The biggest challenge is focus. I started reading Burrows “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” on Friday night, promising to keep to the index and just focus on the deathscape …six hours later I had completely forgotten my promise and was well into just reading! So now, I have mapped out a set number of hours a week, in three-hour chunks, through 15 April. I have also fired up Zotero, to keep me on the mission. [There is nothing like tweezing citations to focus the mind.] I love reading and doing research, but with such a short timeframe I know I need to keep it on the core aims of the project. Discipline!

“Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” or where Lisa spent her Friday night.

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week Seven — Research

This week I have spent most of my time researching William Jenkins Worth. I was able to find only one biography of him, “General William Jenkins Worth: Monterey’s Forgotten Hero” published in 1953, which is now out-of-print. Instead, I’ve been reading contemporary accounts of his life and death.

The New York Times ran several articles about the festivities surrounding Worth’s interment in the monument at 25^th and Broadway. The account from 26 November 1857 is profound in its detail; an entire broadsheet, devoted to the minutia of the day. From the number of horses that drew the casket up Broadway (“sixteen gray horses with black plumes fasten above their heads”) to the impressive number of documents that were included with the casket (I need to understand why Comptroller Flagg’s Report for 1854 was deemed as necessary for the General’s afterlife as a bible) to the many dignitaries who spoke, to the dramatic masonic rituals.

The challenge is to share enough of his biography to explain why he received the honors that he did … only one of two people to be given a public reliquary in NYC, President Grant is the other … and put this tribute in a greater context. Why does society choose to exalt some and neglect others? The reporter who penned the story explained their reverence thusly:

“There was no spot, honorable to the wealth and magnificence of this emporium or worthy of the public services which he had rendered … But, from this day forward, the pilgrim of his genius and patriotism may here kneel in thankfulness, reverence, and admiration, at his shrine. The youth of our counter, passing and repassing this monument, will hereafter pause to peruse the record engraved thereon, of the virtue, service, and fame, of a man whose life presents a beautiful illustration of the institutions of our country, having raised himself from civil life to the highest rank know in the army; and every gradation in the chain of his elevation having been due to the fidelity of his adherence to professional duty.”

I sat across the street from that monument for several hours last week. The city felt almost normal, what with the hint of Spring and warming weather. Some hundred souls passed the obelisk and not one paid it any mind. I was reminded that even the most famous among us can be forgotten.

Worth Square, as seen from Madison Park

“THE Obsequies of General WORTH.; Address of Mayor Wood. Dedication of the WORTH Monument. Imposing Procession.” 26 Nov. 1857. Web. 17 Mar. 2021. Link: https://nyti.ms/30RaW9e

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week Six — Data Management

Our team has had several meetings where we have touched on different aspects of data management. We are using GitHUB for development, which has good version controls for the codebase. That system is self-contained and doesn’t require that we create a system from whole cloth. However, we have agreed to a version control system for file names which is limited to letters, numbers, and the underscore symbol and which includes the creation date.

A bigger challenge is how to collaborate on content creation asynchronously. We have settled on using a shared Google spreadsheet, with each tab being a different aspect of the website: Splash page, timeline page, about page, et cetera. We have also agreed on using Tidy Data* standards for the tracking of all assets. The Tidy Data standard, when applied to a spreadsheet, uses the structure below:

Every column is a variable.
Every row is an observation.
Every cell is a single value.

We expect to start populating the spreadsheet soon so that our developer has some content to push into our site’s wireframe. Our expectation is to have the bulk of our research completed by 15 April. While the spreadsheet will host information about the different data sources, assets we create will be hosted on Wikimedia Commons if a picture or on Soundcloud if an audio file. In this way, we can extend the life of the assets without the worry of having to pay for their storage.

Our team leader is hosting all our shared Google files on their personal Google account. Archives are being saved to the Library on our team Commons site. It will be interesting to see how collaborating in a shared spreadsheet works over time. My biggest fear is that we inadvertently lose information. However, my hope is that by agreeing to conform to these standards at the beginning of the project, we will avoid our developer losing time managing the uploads during the production process.

*SOURCE: https://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html and https://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.pdf.

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week Five — Personal Bio and Contribution Statement

Lisa Kofod …is a writer and producer, they are also a digital humanities student working toward their Master of Arts in the Digital Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A life-long New Yorker, they were drawn to this project because of their love of New York City history and their fascination with how we choose to remember those who came before. How do we determine who “deserves” to be remembered? What do those remembrances look like? How have these remembrances changed over time?

Their primary roles in this project were site design and testing. This included working with the developer on which platform to use and what frameworks to apply, creating best practices for the incorporation of digital assets, and testing the site as it was developed. Their secondary roles were in documentation and research. Documentation included tracking conversations during the development stage and encouraging the team away from scope creep. Research responsibilities included working on technical options and scholarly research on a set of war memorials within Manhattan.

Lisa’s Public Journal – Week One

It has been an exciting week for our cemeteries project. The team is coming together: we have a GC Commons forum that we are using to collaborate and are well on the way to defining the goals of the project and its central conceit. We have had to rethink the original idea in part because it was too closely tied to the work of one scholar and so might be seen only as an unoriginal derivative. I am relieved to have been confronted by that lens. Now we have the opportunity to craft something that is unique. We are considering timelines and walking tours. Tonight is our next team meeting and I am looking forward to discussing our options and learning where everyone is landing.

My primary role for this project is design and testing, with documentation and research as my secondary role. Since we are still deciding on the technology, I have spent most of my time engaging in our forum and researching possible technologies. Today I did a test of GPS photography. The photo below taken with my smartphone with GPS enabled was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. It maps beautifully to the protocols they use, see https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=File:General_William_Jenkins_Worth_Monument.jpg&params=040.742770_N_-073.989128_E_globe:Earth_type:camera__&language=en.

Testing GPS uploading to Wikimedia commons.

There is an actual person buried in that massive monument: General William Jenkins Worth (1794–1849). This site is the second oldest major monument in the parks of New York City. I have probably walked by it a thousand times and never understood that. According to the NYC Parks website, ” A relic box was placed in the cornerstone” (source: https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/worth-square/monuments/1734). I suspect I will be learning a lot more about General Worth, given this is likely to be the location I will focus on.

I’ll close this entry on a colloquial note: I have discovered that people are putting QR codes on gravestones which then link back to webpages about the person. The Twitter thread about one academic’s exercise in one gravestone was well-worth the read, especially the comments about academics and citations. Sadly, the tweet has been taken down! [A good reminder to always screenshoot and, when possible, cache helpful pages to the WayBackMachine.] In short, the academic found this gravestone with a QC embedded and did a post on it, but obscured the QC so the wider-web could not access the dead person’s CV. One Twitter quip: “You have denied him his citations!”

DHUM 70002 Digital Humanities: Methods and Practices (Spring 2021)