Digital Humanities

One Run: Resilience in the Wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing

At 2:49 p.m. on April 15, 2013, two homemade bombs were detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, just over four hours after the start of the race. The aftermath of this disaster, on what should have been a joyful occasion, was devastating. Three spectators were killed, and 281 other people were injured. Many people in Boston and surrounding communities were affected and sought to find ways of healing from this trauma.

Among those seeking to make sense of this event were Northeastern English professors Dr. Ryan Cordell and Dr. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. They noted the strong reactions in their students, including those not directly impacted by the bombing, and decided to collect public stories of the larger Boston community. They hired a team of graduate students to gather and organize contributions, with the goal of creating an online community archive reflecting on this event. Two graduate students from this original team, Dr. Jim McGrath and Dr. Alicia Peaker, later became co-directors of this project. Along the way, collaborations were established with the NPR radio station, WBUR, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Public Library. The goal of this collection, later entitled Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, was to construct a public memory to foster a better sense of community in the wake of this tragedy.

The Our Marathon collection includes nearly 8,000 items, with materials ranging from letters to collages to oral histories and other first-person accounts collected by those who founded the project. This archive bears some resemblance to other projects that used crowdsourced materials in response to a public trauma, such as the September 11 Digital Archive (created in 2001) and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (created in 2005 following hurricanes Katrina and Rita). All three of these projects also focus on the places where traumatic events have occurred. There is a strong emphasis in this collection on showing the implications of this attack for the local community, although materials also include letters sent to people in Boston from students around the world.

In this past year I have become familiar with these materials while adding to and editing some of the metadata for these items in the DRS to clarify the copyright status, associated names and subjects of these materials, as well as the languages used in certain items, for researchers. In surveying this collection, I was particularly intrigued by how the marathon community dealt with this trauma. This attack created a lot of fear and uncertainty around future marathons. In fact, the London Marathon was run six days later, and security was greatly increased there because of what had happened in Boston. But many marathoners in Boston and across the country defiantly raced again, and two of these races – both called “One Run” – are documented in the Our Marathon collection.

Several people run over the yellow and blue finish line of the Boston Marathon.
Runners at “One Run” event in Boston (May 2013). Photo courtesy of MarathonFoto Photographrs.

The first of these races, the “One Run” Boston Marathon event, took place on May 25, 2013. The bombings kept about 5,700 runners from finishing the original race on April 15, and so “One Run” was seen as a way for these runners to complete the final mile of the race. The Facebook post about the event also said “all are welcome to run – nobody will be turned away. This is a free event open to everyone. No registration is required.” This event was thus meant to be inclusive and healing, but it also allowed marathoners to re-experience the outcome of their race.

A video of the opening ceremony for “One Run” is available through the Our Marathon collection. During this ceremony, the national anthem is sung by the children’s choir of the St. Ann Parish, the church to which Martin Richard—an 8-year-old boy who was killed by the bombing—belonged.

Four people stand on the side of a road in what looks like a desert holding a white banner reading "One Run Boston Relay" and displaying a blue map of the United States with a white trail from Los Angeles to Boston. There are signatures all over the sign. Three of the people are wearing blue t-shirts that say "One Run Boston."
Carrying the Banner at the #onerun for Boston. June 11, 2013

Numerous photographs, contributed to this archive by MarathonFoto, also display the joy of the participants and their families as they cross the finish line.

The second race highlighted in the Our Marathon collection occurred a month later. “One Run for Boston” was a non-stop running relay of 3,328 miles, starting in Los Angeles on June 7, 2013, and ending in Boston on June 30, 2013. This race, organized by Danny Bent, Kate Treleaven and Jamie Hay, was a fundraiser, collecting $550,000 for the victims of the bombing through Boston’s One Fund.

The “One Run for Boston” race had an emotional finish. John Odom was badly injured while watching his daughter run on April 15. On June 30, his daughter, Nichole Reis, handed the baton to him in his wheelchair and pushed him over the finish line.

A man sitting in a wheelchair wearing a yellow raincoat over a Boston Strong shirt is smiling and surrounded by cheering runners wearing One Run Boston shirts
John Odom and “Miles” the Baton. July 1, 2013. Photo courtesy of Kristi Girdharry

Both of the “One Run” races served first and foremost as an acknowledgement of the suffering caused by the marathon bombing. They also served as a unifying force, made clear by the obvious camaraderie displayed in the photos here. But finally, these races allowed marathoners a kind of therapeutic experience – they took hold of a situation in which they were vulnerable and transformed it into an active reclamation.

Library Digital Scholarship Group and NULab receive $500,000 NEH grant

The Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group and the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks received a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the NEH’s American Rescue Plan program.

The American Rescue Plan aims to provide funding to organizations conducting humanities projects that were adversely affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The grant awarded to the DSG and NULab is specifically focused on supporting humanities organizations.

This grant will help fund a series of digital projects currently underway through the DSG and NULab, but that were delayed or postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It will support efforts to conduct collaborative research, digitize and process archival materials, create metadata, increase web accessibility, and more, while creating many graduate and undergraduate student research positions to conduct this work.

The projects that will benefit from this grant all involve collaborative engagement with communities outside of Northeastern, with many of them focused on resources related to underrepresented groups and social justice efforts. These include:

The grant also includes funding for additional projects organized through the NULab.

Julia Flanders, the director of the Digital Scholarship Group, is excited to get started: “We are honored and energized by this award. It creates wonderful research opportunities for students and will help the entire digital humanities ecology at Northeastern.”

Using Functional Specification as a Tool for Project Communication

Digital projects involve complex collaborative networks, and they are at their strongest when they draw on the many different kinds of expertise that their participants have to share. At the same time, it can be challenging to draw together all of those different contributions of information, requirements, needs, and ideas in a single place. How do we bridge the differences in technical, cultural, and disciplinary knowledge within these teams, and create shared documentation that can evolve effectively during the project’s full life cycle?

In the past few months, the Digital Scholarship Group has been experimenting with adapting the functional specification—a writing genre that originated in software application and system development—to serve as a tool for project communication. As part of the Northeastern University Library’s recent LibCon event (a departmental sharing of projects and ideas among colleagues), members of the DSG presented a panel session that explored various aspects of this work from different perspectives. This post draws on those presentations to give an overview of the features, challenges, and possibilities of functional specifications in a digital humanities applied research group.

The genre of the “functional specification” in its original context covers several different types of terrain. As Senior DSG Developer Rob Chavez and Associate Director for Systems Patrick Murray-John described it, it captures important contextual information about the purpose and objectives of the project, the features and functions of the tool being developed (from the perspective of specific users and their needs), and the actors and entities (e.g. users, roles, and data) that are involved.

Functional specification definition flow chart

There are numerous benefits from gathering this level of detailed information at the inception of a project. At the level of practical planning, it provides concrete information that in turn makes it easier to develop design specifications, technical specifications, development plans, and tests to determine when a project has been successfully completed: if the functional specification describes a search function that returns results ranked by relevance, we know we’re not done until that is working. Perhaps equally important for the DSG, the process of creating a functional specification fosters participatory collaboration among the project’s constituents and prompts deep thinking about what the project is really seeking to accomplish, and helps the project agree on what it really needs before putting effort into building a working version. It also pulls together information that may be helpful for other purposes (such as grant-writing or publicity).

The functional specification also sits within a wider network of tools. Patrick Murray-John showed how the written document provides detail on specific features (such as searching, or viewing a map, or uploading a new file) which then gets translated into specific programming or design tasks which are stored in project management tools such as an issue tracker. While the functional specification provides a road map, the issue tracker provides a view of progress being made and enables the daily coordination of tasks and effort that are so necessary within a collaborative team. When a given feature is prototyped and eventually completed, the functional specification can then be used again as a confirmation that the real needs of the project have been met, and it can also serve as a place to record unfinished work that may have been out of scope—which in turn might feed into a future phase of the project’s development, or support future fund-raising efforts.

Functional specifications, in their original context in the software development industry, typically operate within a fairly uniform technical team with a lot of shared skills and knowledge. As a result, the common practices and familiar features of this genre mostly focus on its practical and technical aspects: a data inventory, user stories, use cases, preconditions, the logical flow of operations from step to step within a given functional context. For the DSG, experimentation with functional specifications has focused on building out the genre in a few different directions. First, as DSG Director Julia Flanders described through the example of the Digital Archive of American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance (DAILP) project, the functional specification can function more effectively as a bridge between different parts of the project team if it includes deeper contextual information: not only user stories, but also detailed information about the motivations and investments of specific user communities, which in turn help the team understand how the project’s data is shaped and why. In the case of the DAILP, understanding the differing needs of language learners, academic researchers, and language experts within the Cherokee tribes is crucial to technical design and decision-making at every level. As the DSG develops templates and guidance for project teams in writing functional specifications, we are putting greater emphasis on those topics and urging projects to use the functional specification as a prompt for early conversation. The DSG has also been experimenting with involving project teams more fully with creating the functional specification itself, rather than treating it as a purely technical genre. DSG Associate Director Amanda Rust discussed her work with the project team for the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) to develop detailed accounts of the project’s working processes and research, a process that has empowered the group to imagine the functional possibilities more concretely, and intensified their sense of involvement and investment in the development process.

As Senior Digital Library Developer David Cliff pointed out in his contribution to the panel, one of the important roles of the functional specification is to bring clarity and consensus about project scope, and to avoid miscommunication or the dreaded “scope creep” that can occur when functional requirements aren’t clearly laid out at the outset. At the same time, as he and others noted, research projects like these are by their nature prone to change as they explore new possibilities. And similarly the DSG, as an applied research group, is always venturing into unfamiliar territory where precise time estimates are difficult.

10-panel description of the design process.

The functional specification must therefore tread carefully between attempting to pin things down too closely or prematurely, on the one hand, and leaving things so underspecified that a project is never done, on the other. Iteration plays an important role here: sometimes a project team needs to see a prototype of a search results display before they can imagine the full set of facets and options that will make it truly useful. To be most useful, the functional specification needs to be able to establish achievable interim goals while also keeping track of the project’s largest vision. It is thus always a living and evolving document, and as one audience member pointed out in the panel discussion, it needs to make that evolution possible.

The Digital Scholarship Group has thus far developed three draft functional specifications and a draft template which also documents our emerging practices in this area. In the coming year, there are several areas where further research and experimentation will be needed. First, we want to create a fuller template and more detailed documentation of how and when different parts of the functional specification are most useful, situationally. Second, we want to continue to experiment with involving project teams in the authoring process. Third, we need to develop effective means for translating specific functions from the specification into concrete development tasks (to be tracked via GitHub). And finally, we need to tackle the question of versioning, and create transparent mechanisms for allowing the specification to evolve without losing its documentary value or creating confusion.

Northeastern University Library Receives Two National Endowment for the Humanities Grants

August 8th, 2018 – The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Northeastern University Library a $500,000 Infrastructure and Capacity-Building Challenge Grant. The funded project – Research Infrastructure for Digital Scholarship – will further propel Northeastern’s commitment to digital scholarship, the synthesis of archival materials and data, and experiential education. This challenge grant will expand the Library’s technical capacity through the creation of four new staff positions to undertake technical development, data design, and semantic data integration.

Northeastern University Library also received $197,000 from the NEH’s Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program to support “Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist: Institutes on Critical Teaching and Research with Vector Space Models”, a series of four three-day institutes that will explore the use of word embedding models for textual analysis.

Formed in 2013, The Library’s Digital Scholarship Group has undertaken several important digital humanities projects, including Design for Diversity, Our Marathon, TAPAS, and the Women Writers Project. This challenge grant will continue to support these projects, as well as provide support for the recently announced Boston Research Center, which will be housed in Snell Library. The director of the Digital Scholarship Group, Julia Flanders, will provide leadership on both grants, and Sarah Connell is a co-director on the “Word Vectors” grant.

“In many ways these grants recognize and reward the great progress we’ve made over the past five years in establishing the Library as a significant research partner in the digital humanities at Northeastern, and affirm Northeastern’s status as a leader in this space” states Patrick Yott, Associate Dean for Digital Strategies and Services.

“We deeply appreciate this major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and are truly excited about the additional projects and overall capacity this funding will underwrite in the Library and across Northeastern,” said Dan Cohen, the Dean of the Libraries.

How one prolific Wikipedian is giving voice to pre-20th century women’s stories

This post was written by Cassidy Villeneuve on March 28th, 2018 and originally published on wikiedu.org As part of Women’s History Month, we’re looking at how our programs are helping to close Wikipedia’s gender gap. So far, we’ve featured work by students in our Classroom Program, who have improved Wikipedia’s coverage of women directors, women in STEM, women in academia, and more.
Visiting Scholar Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight. File:Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight.jpg, VGrigas (WMF), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. 
This week, we’re profiling Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, a prolific Wikipedian and a participant in our Visiting Scholars program, a program in which Wikipedians receive access to academic sources they wouldn’t otherwise be able to use. During her years as a Wikipedian, Rosie has created and improved thousands of articles and has uploaded hundreds of images to Wikimedia Commons. She has also co-founded projects like Women in Red, an on-Wikipedia group dedicated to increasing the site’s coverage of women and women’s history, and the Teahouse, a project to welcome newbies into the editing community. In 2016, she was named Wikipedian of the Year, along with Emily Temple-Wood, for her efforts to improve the world’s most popular online encyclopedic resource. When Rosie joined our Visiting Scholars program, she gained access to a number of new sources through Northeastern University. This new access to previously restricted materials “adds another dimension” to Rosie’s workflow, she tells us in an interview about what she’s accomplished through the position. Rosie has already made impressive progress since March of last year, as seen on the Dashboard. Through the position, Rosie is focusing on improving biographies of pre-20th century women writers in the English language (with the definition of “writer” broadly construed). At this point in her Visiting Scholars experience, Rosie has created 194 new articles on Wikipedia, most of which are biographies of these pre-20th century women, and has added nearly 500,000 words. She estimates that in all of her time as a Wikipedian, she has created hundreds of biography articles of women. So what motivates Rosie to dedicate valuable time and energy to improving this resource that we all use? As Rosie explains, it all starts with one woman: her maternal grandmother, a textbook editor in Serbia and co-founder and president of the Yugoslav Association of University Women. She wrote for a living and published a number of monographs, essays, translations, and books throughout her life. In a similar vein, Rosie’s mother was a poet who earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Barnard and spent time in Columbia’s journalism school. These women writers had a significant impact on Rosie and their stories have been an impetus for her journey into public scholarship. <br< Rosie’s motivation for improving Wikipedia’s coverage of women’s history is a personal one, and so it’s not surprising that she has personally connected with stories of women she has written about. When asked about particular articles that have been most meaningful to her, Rosie points to the life of Deolinda Rodríguez de Almeida. Deolinda is considered the mother of the Angolan revolution. She was an avid writer, translator, poet, and teacher. She dedicated her life to the Angolan Independence movement, and was tortured and killed for her involvement. “She was so bound to her cause, to her people,” Rosie remarks. “She traveled from Angola, she was in Brazil, she corresponded with Martin Luther King, Jr. She touched my heart. And to know that the last days of her life were so wronged just — she just sticks with me.”
Eunice Eloisae Gibbs Allyn, who has a biography article on Wikipedia thanks to Rosie. File:Eunice Eloisae Gibbs Allyn.png, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
“Many of the women, their lives are important to me,” Rosie tells us. Eunice Eloisae Gibbs Allyn is another example; she was forced to write under a pen name (as were many women writers of this time) because her brother didn’t want to have a “bluestocking” in the family. By representing the lives and accomplishments of these women writers for Wikipedia’s worldwide audience, Rosie honors their names. While they were silenced in the past, we are not silent about them now. “Jane Doe, you deserve this,” Rosie says about the importance of writing these biography articles, “I know I can do it, and if I don’t do it, I don’t know who else is gonna do it.” There is an element of leadership inherent in the active Wikipedian role. Wikipedia encourages volunteers to “Be bold!” in their editing. And the site’s open-source nature puts the responsibility of maintaining its quality on volunteers. Part of what makes Wikipedia one of the most successful crowd-sourced knowledge projects to date is the avid commitment of editors like Rosie. Wikipedians rally to uphold Wikipedia’s purpose of benefiting readers everywhere by being the most comprehensive and accessible encyclopedia ever written. We’re proud to support dedicated Wikipedia editors like Rosie through our Visiting Scholars program. We look forward to following the impact that Rosie continues to make on the valuable resource that is Wikipedia.