Very little is known about who they were.

Shadows on Stone, a new crowd-sourced digital history project that began in a Fordham history class, seeks to fill in that gap and, in doing so, help restore the humanity of a group of people who have historically been dismissed as irredeemable.

The goal of the project is to transfer digitized records that were entered when prisoners first arrived at the prison. Since only a very small number of the inmates ever wrote about their time there, these “mini-biographies” of their lives before imprisonment offer the only glimpses of who they were.

Anyone who would like to help is welcome to try their hand at transforming the hand-written documents into legible text that will eventually be entered into a searchable database.

Analyzing Data in a Fordham History Class

The project first began in 2018, when Fordham undergraduate students in two honors history classes were tasked by now-retired professor Roger Panetta, Ph.D., to analyze some of the entries from the first set of names. The data was then uploaded to the crowd-sourcing research site Zooniverse.

The students published two reports based on their findings: The NYC Criminal and Sing Sing Penitentiary in the 19th Century and Paved with Good Intentions: Origins of the New York Penitentiary. They also created an entry that is currently on the Sing Sing Museum’s webpage.

Open to Public Volunteers

Panetta, who is writing a book about Sing Sing, decided to expand the project and open it to the public. A soft launch for the Shadows on Stone took place in August; it will fully go live in October.

Anyone who would like to help is welcome to try their hand at transforming the hand-written documents into legible text that will eventually be entered into a searchable database.

Panetta said the data on these inmates was originally collected as part of a movement in the 19th century to identify the so-called “criminal class.”

Using ‘Fragmented Biographies’ to Gain Insight

“When I first saw the records, I thought, ‘Oh, this is great stuff.’ So-and-so grew up here, lived on this street, committed this crime, had no parents. Or, one parent was a Catholic, one spoke Italian, one could read, one could not read, one had these scars on his body, and so on,” he said.

“I began to wonder if these would constitute a kind of fragmented biography, which could give us an insight into who they were. We could then begin to challenge the popular view that they’re just bad, horrific people.”

In 2015, the State of New York let Ancestry.com scan all the logbooks containing these records and make them publicly viewable. They’re still handwritten, though, so it’s fallen to volunteers to decipher the handwriting and record it digitally for further analysis.

For those who have trouble reading the handwriting, there are tools allowing users to zoom in on the entry as well as a forum for discussing them.

Influencing Conversations on Mass Incarceration

In time, Panetta said he hopes that understanding the past of a place as legendary as Sing Sing can influence current conversations around incarceration in the United States.

“The contemporary view of victims of mass incarceration is they’re Black, they’re poor, they’re undereducated,” he said, adding that there’s much more at play and even characteristics like dyslexia can play a role.

“[Mass incarceration] is a problem. We think it has to do with race. We think it has to do with economic conditions. We know it has to do with educational levels. And so the thinking is, ‘Maybe we should look more closely.’ That can help us break the cycle of incarceration.”

University Efforts in the Digital Humanities

Baker Josephs’ talk resonated with an audience of digital humanities practitioners, but it also carried special resonance for the University which has been at the forefront of the Digital Humanities, starting with the Medieval Studies program, which was an early adopter of digitization. The Bronx African American History Project and the newly launched Italian American History Initiative continue to grow the field.

The Fordham Research Council also recently recommended that a digital scholarship be established to encourage the “use of new technologies to advance methods of inquiry and scholarly communication, as well as research on digital technology and media.” Micki McGee, Ph.D., and Gregory Donovan, Ph.D., will coordinate the effort under the newly formed Digital Scholarship Consortium.

Keeping the Focus

Baker Josephs emphasized that no matter the discipline, keeping focus is key.

“It’s easy to get distracted, so if you’re in collaboration with a community you need to make sure you’re not just ham-handedly going out and doing whatever you want,” she said. “Listen to the community, and they will show you how they want the project to go.”

She added that some projects have very specific audiences, such as the community itself. Others are geared toward researchers, and some address both groups. Regardless, researchers need to decide upfront what the goals of the project will be, as it will affect the design of the interface in both practical and aesthetic ways, she said.

She cited the recently redesigned site, Slave Societies Digital Archive, hosted by Vanderbilt University, as an example of an archive specifically geared to researchers. The archive holds a half million images documenting the history of nearly 8 million slaves, primarily though ecclesiastical documents.

“The original technical design wasn’t serving their researchers. They couldn’t search or save things the way they needed to,” she said. “Sometimes you need to revisit the aims that were from one year, two years, or even five years ago.”

Open Ended vs. Ongoing Projects

Many projects, like the Bronx African American History Project and the Italian American History Initiative, are “living” projects where materials, in this case oral histories, are continuously added over time.

“That’s the tension one can find in some projects, it’s not always like at the end of the book where you close it,” said Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., the co-director of the initiative. “With digital humanities, it can be opened ended, a living breathing organism.”

But not all projects are designed to be updated or upgraded, said Baker Josephs.

She cited an elegantly designed interactive site called HOPE: Living & Loving with HIV in Jamaica, as an example of a project with limited parameters and meant primarily for a public, rather than academic, audience. The site included poems by Kwame Dawes, testimonials by people living with HIV, analysis from researchers, videos, and music. But even though the mutli-media project was completed in 2008, the stories of the people living with HIV continued. When one of the subjects died in 2015, a tribute by Dawes was published by the Pulitzer Center.

“The thing with the HIV project was that it was static and done,” she said. “There was no space for the story to continue and so they had to put that story somewhere else.”

The start of the project thus becomes all the more important, she said.

Baker Josephs said that her examples correspond to an emerging digital humanities moment where activism blends with research, particularly when the research involves “diverse minority communities.”

“One can hack or yack all one wants, but if either is divorced from a real-time community then what use is the work?” she said.

She cautioned against a “rush to be timely political and radical” for “underprivileged populations in ways that make us feel relevant and then patting ourselves on the back while also accepting rewards and accolades of the academy.”

“We must collaborate with these communities.”

The Oxford Outremer Map project is a collaboration among the center’s faculty, students, and fellows to restore a 13th-century map that depicts the coastline of the Crusader states, now modern-day Israel and Palestine. The map was likely made or copied by an English monk named Matthew Paris, said Laura K. Morreale, PhD, associate director of the center, and offers a glimpse into various—sometimes abstract—functions of medieval maps.

“It’s very different than how we understand maps today,” Morreale said. “Some of the locales are biblical, so they’re not recognizable in modern terms. A couple places even depict what the mapmakers thought would happen in the future. So, not only is it a practical map, it’s also a kind of visualization of what they hope will happen one day.

“That’s part of the larger conversation,” she said. “Maps should be approached the way you would approach a piece of literature. You don’t just look at the text, but you think about its context and the material reality that surrounded it.”

When Nicholas Paul, PhD, an associate professor of history, encountered the map reproduction as part of the center’s French of Outremer digital humanities initiative, he found the document in poor condition. Besides suffering the expected wear-and-tear over eight centuries, the map had been drawn on the back of a used sheet of parchment. Over time, the colors on the front bled through and obscured Matthew’s drawings and notes.

For years the map was overlooked by medieval scholars, despite its depiction of an important region. Hoping to make it legible again, Paul and Tobias Hrynick, a doctoral student in history, brought the map to the Medieval studies center, where then-graduate student Rachel Butcher, GSAS ’15, worked to spruce it up in Photoshop.

The result is a full, colorized digital version of the map, complete with interactive features and annotations written by the graduate students and fellows.

“It’s not just digitally presented—it’s digitally enabled scholarship,” Morreale said. “It’s user-guided, so users can interact with the map on their own terms. There’s also a discussion section, where users can write in with their input, and there’s a ‘mysteries of the map’ section, where we list the parts of the map we haven’t yet been able to identify. We’re encouraging people to write in if they have some knowledge about these.”

At a colloquium on April 9, scholars discussed the significance of both the map itself—including its relevance to medieval cartography and whether Matthew Paris was indeed its author—and how scholars can use the digital restoration to maximize teaching and research.

“We’re in the process of creating a module for people who want to use this map in classrooms,” Morreale said. “That, in my mind, has been one of the greatest aspects of this project. We were able to take a discussion in our office and project it out into the larger, scholarly world. It’s now accessible to anyone who is interested, with just a few clicks.”

An emerging set of research methods is quietly revolutionizing how academics and others in the humanities approach their scholarly pursuits.

Digital humanities, or DH for short, employs digital media and advanced computational technologies to advance the traditional questions posed by the humanities disciplines.

To focus attention on DH, hundreds of members of the global academic community logged on to a WordPress site on March 18, where they blogged and photographed the details of their day.

The symbolic ad hoc gathering was dubbed “A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities.”

For academics who use the cutting-edge research methods in their scholarship, terms such as crowd sourcing, wikis, digital collection development, text mining and geospatial mapping (GIS) have become standard vocabulary.

But for humanities scholars who have not yet ventured into the terrain of advanced digital technologies, these terms—and the research methods and scholarly products they describe—may seem a stark break with traditional peer-reviewed journals or academic monographs.

Yet as the world morphs from print to e-book, and as research tools move from tangible to intangible material, the transition nears.

How can a university successfully bridge the divide between what the past dictates and what the future holds?

Traditional scholars in the Jesuit community have been at the forefront of these new research methods from the start. Italian Jesuit Roberto Busa was a pioneer in the field (then known as “computational humanities”) when he approached IBM founder Thomas Watson in 1948 to enlist the aid of his information science team in the creation of an electronic concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas.

DH at Fordham is growing thanks to the Digital Humanities Working Group, a team of faculty members, administrators, librarians and University information technologists with an interest in furthering DH methods and platforms.

Supported by the provost’s office, the dean of the Arts and Sciences faculty and Fordham IT, the Digital Humanities Working Group is co-chaired by J. Patrick Hornbeck II, D. Phil., assistant professor of theology and medieval studies, and Micki McGee, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology.

“Digital technologies will be central to the way that scholarship is practiced and articulated,” McGee said. “How do we ensure that the next generation of scholars coming up at Fordham—either as new faculty or graduate students—find that their digital humanities work is adequately discussed, embraced and supported? We are interested in seeing that happen.”

This past spring, the provost’s office sponsored the initiatives of several Fordham faculty members, helping them to advance their DH projects, including online resources being developed by Hornbeck and McGee.

In “The Latin Works of John Wyclif,” Hornbeck has begun to digitize 10,000 pages of the medieval philosopher’s writings, taking a set of 26 volumes to which few people have access and making them available online for free.

In the Yaddo Archive Project, McGee digitized residency records from the renowned artists’ colony to examine the social relationships among 1,700 of its members. To do this, she developed an interactive digital platform that illustrates—through timelines, photos and complex starburst-like graphic mapping—the pivotal importance of social relationships to artistic productivity.

Perhaps the oldest DH project at Fordham is also one of its most successful. In 1995, Maryanne Kowaleski, Ph.D., the Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., Distinguished Professor of History and director of medieval studies, helped graduate student Paul Halsall put the Internet Medieval History Sourcebook on the Fordham website, providing digital translations of copyright-free medieval primary sources.

“If you Google the word ‘medieval,’ one of the first things that comes up is the Fordham site,” said Kowaleski, noting that the Sourcebook accounts for 40 percent of all traffic at www.fordham.edu. “That has been a huge public relations boost for us in medieval studies. The large number of graduate applications we get because of the Sourcebook shows us the true reach of digital humanities.”

A number of other faculty members have had projects in the works for several years. In 2007, Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., director of the American studies program, associate professor of English, and co-editor of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU, 2007), developed The Keywords Collaboratory, a wiki-based space where students across the country can collaborate on an online essay about a word, extracting meanings of that particular word from multiple sources.

Through its online creation and posting, the essay becomes, in effect, dynamic knowledge—ever-changing, ever-expanding— and a new collaborative form of scholarship that no print-based book could accommodate.

Over the last five years, Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., associate professor of art history, has developed a web-based and DVD work, VISTAS: Visual Culture in Spanish America 1520-1820, published by the University of Texas Press, that interprets 350 high-resolution images of Latin American art and architecture. Through it, says Mundy, students are freed up by a visual format that doesn’t lock them into looking at illustrations in a book.

And Roger Panetta, Ph.D., visiting professor in the Department of History and curator of the Hudson River Collection at the University Libraries, has collaborated with 13 other regional libraries and archives to create the Fordham-based Digital Hudson, a digital repository of documents concerning the river’s history and centrality to the region. The collection, which began nearly five years ago, includes more than 154 items.

It is no coincidence that, when one discusses DH, the word “collaboration” seems to be right there in the mix. By virtue of open source technology, DH is fundamentally a “collaborative and interdisciplinary” activity, McGee said.

“DH is often less hierarchical than traditional scholarly contexts,” she said. “It also opens up new avenues of scholarship.”

For example, while “close reading” of one or two texts is the norm in exploring the nature of literature, new computer models make “distant reading” the latest in scholarly phenomena. This method, being pioneered at the Stanford University Literary Lab, analyzes massive amounts of digital data in, perhaps, entire canons of literature.

One thorny problem for the DH scholar, however, is that most DH-based research relies on rapidly evolving technology that is constantly in flux. For that reason, McGee received funding this past summer from the National Endowment of the Humanities to work with other scholars to develop standards for interoperable data that fosters collaborative archival research.

As part of their provost-funded initiative, McGee and Hornbeck, along with Erick Kelemen, Ph.D., director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, visited several universities to see how other institutions support digital humanities scholarship. At Loyola University Chicago, said McGee, humanities researchers are joining their own computer science faculty to develop new technologies and research ventures.

“This is a brilliant approach,” she said. “You capture the cutting edge of computer sciences work and partner it with cutting-edge humanities work.”

So, too, is creating standards for the scholarly assessment of such projects. How would any digital humanist’s project—such as Mundy’s VISTAS and its 200,000 words of original text—be judged in a tenure or promotion review?

There are efforts underway by the Modern Library Association and the American Historical Association to better define best practices for peer review of digital humanities projects and publications. But there are still “serious methodological and architectural challenges” regarding digital scholarship, Hornbeck said.

“It will take a generation or two of scholars transitioning this in,” he said. “I doubt this will be a conversation that will be ongoing in 2050, but it certainly will be in 2016.”

An emerging set of research methods is quietly revolutionizing how academics and others in the humanities approach their scholarly pursuits.

Digital humanities, or DH for short, employs digital media and advanced computational technologies to advance the traditional questions posed by the humanities disciplines.

To focus attention on DH, hundreds of members of the global academic community logged on to a WordPress site on March 18, where they blogged and photographed the details of their day.

The symbolic ad hoc gathering was dubbed “A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities.”

For academics who use the cutting-edge research methods in their scholarship, terms such as crowd sourcing, wikis, digital collection development, text mining and geospatial mapping (GIS) have become standard vocabulary.

But for humanities scholars who have not yet ventured into the terrain of advanced digital technologies, these terms—and the research methods and scholarly products they describe—may seem a stark break with traditional peer-reviewed journals or academic monographs.

Yet as the world morphs from print to e-book, and as research tools move from tangible to intangible material, the transition nears.

How can a university successfully bridge the divide between what the past dictates and what the future holds?

Traditional scholars in the Jesuit community have been at the forefront of these new research methods from the start. Italian Jesuit Roberto Busa was a pioneer in the field (then known as “computational humanities”) when he approached IBM founder Thomas Watson in 1948 to enlist the aid of his information science team in the creation of an electronic concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas.

DH at Fordham is growing thanks to the Digital Humanities Working Group, a team of faculty members, administrators, librarians and University information technologists with an interest in furthering DH methods and platforms.

Supported by the provost’s office, the dean of the Arts and Sciences faculty and Fordham IT, the Digital Humanities Working Group is co-chaired by J. Patrick Hornbeck II, D. Phil., assistant professor of theology and medieval studies, and Micki McGee, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology.

“Digital technologies will be central to the way that scholarship is practiced and articulated,” McGee said. “How do we ensure that the next generation of scholars coming up at Fordham—either as new faculty or graduate students—find that their digital humanities work is adequately discussed, embraced and supported? We are interested in seeing that happen.”

This past spring, the provost’s office sponsored the initiatives of several Fordham faculty members, helping them to advance their DH projects, including online resources being developed by Hornbeck and McGee.

In “The Latin Works of John Wyclif,” Hornbeck has begun to digitize 10,000 pages of the medieval philosopher’s writings, taking a set of 26 volumes to which few people have access and making them available online for free.

In the Yaddo Archive Project, McGee digitized residency records from the renowned artists’ colony to examine the social relationships among 1,700 of its members. To do this, she developed an interactive digital platform that illustrates—through timelines, photos and complex starburst-like graphic mapping—the pivotal importance of social relationships to artistic productivity.

Perhaps the oldest DH project at Fordham is also one of its most successful. In 1995, Maryanne Kowaleski, Ph.D., the Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., Distinguished Professor of History and director of medieval studies, helped graduate student Paul Halsall put the Internet Medieval History Sourcebook on the Fordham website, providing digital translations of copyright-free medieval primary sources.

“If you Google the word ‘medieval,’ one of the first things that comes up is the Fordham site,” said Kowaleski, noting that the Sourcebook accounts for 40 percent of all traffic at www.fordham.edu. “That has been a huge public relations boost for us in medieval studies. The large number of graduate applications we get because of the Sourcebook shows us the true reach of digital humanities.”

A number of other faculty members have had projects in the works for several years. In 2007, Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., director of the American studies program, associate professor of English, and co-editor of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU, 2007), developed The Keywords Collaboratory, a wiki-based space where students across the country can collaborate on an online essay about a word, extracting meanings of that particular word from multiple sources.

Through its online creation and posting, the essay becomes, in effect, dynamic knowledge—ever-changing, ever-expanding— and a new collaborative form of scholarship that no print-based book could accommodate.

Over the last five years, Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., associate professor of art history, has developed a web-based and DVD work, VISTAS: Visual Culture in Spanish America 1520-1820, published by the University of Texas Press, that interprets 350 high-resolution images of Latin American art and architecture. Through it, says Mundy, students are freed up by a visual format that doesn’t lock them into looking at illustrations in a book.

And Roger Panetta, Ph.D., visiting professor in the Department of History and curator of the Hudson River Collection at the University Libraries, has collaborated with 13 other regional libraries and archives to create the Fordham-based Digital Hudson, a digital repository of documents concerning the river’s history and centrality to the region. The collection, which began nearly five years ago, includes more than 154 items.

It is no coincidence that, when one discusses DH, the word “collaboration” seems to be right there in the mix. By virtue of open source technology, DH is fundamentally a “collaborative and interdisciplinary” activity, McGee said.

“DH is often less hierarchical than traditional scholarly contexts,” she said. “It also opens up new avenues of scholarship.”

For example, while “close reading” of one or two texts is the norm in exploring the nature of literature, new computer models make “distant reading” the latest in scholarly phenomena. This method, being pioneered at the Stanford University Literary Lab, analyzes massive amounts of digital data in, perhaps, entire canons of literature.

One thorny problem for the DH scholar, however, is that most DH-based research relies on rapidly evolving technology that is constantly in flux. For that reason, McGee received funding this past summer from the National Endowment of the Humanities to work with other scholars to develop standards for interoperable data that fosters collaborative archival research.

As part of their provost-funded initiative, McGee and Hornbeck, along with Erick Kelemen, Ph.D., director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, visited several universities to see how other institutions support digital humanities scholarship. At Loyola University Chicago, said McGee, humanities researchers are joining their own computer science faculty to develop new technologies and research ventures.

“This is a brilliant approach,” she said. “You capture the cutting edge of computer sciences work and partner it with cutting-edge humanities work.”

So, too, is creating standards for the scholarly assessment of such projects. How would any digital humanist’s project—such as Mundy’s VISTAS and its 200,000 words of original text—be judged in a tenure or promotion review?

There are efforts underway by the Modern Library Association and the American Historical Association to better define best practices for peer review of digital humanities projects and publications. But there are still “serious methodological and architectural challenges” regarding digital scholarship, Hornbeck said.

“It will take a generation or two of scholars transitioning this in,” he said. “I doubt this will be a conversation that will be ongoing in 2050, but it certainly will be in 2016.”