Category Archives: Uncategorized

Area Studies, Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, Global Studies, Humanities & Liberal Arts, Open Access, Read Hot and Digitized, Uncategorized

Read Hot and Digitized: Mapping the Movimiento: Revealing Layers of City History

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Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

Cities have layers of history, of memory, constantly evolving, with new layers settling over old ones. While “the city’s name may remain the same, its physical expression is always in the process of transformation, deformation, or is forgotten and modified to suit other needs or destroyed for other purposes”[1]. The city that someone knew ten years ago is not the version of the city that I see now. However, memories have a way of sticking, remaining “deeply intertwined with the physical and social fabric of cities”[2]. Stories occupy the abandoned buildings we pass by on our walks, the apartments that our friends live in, the streets we drive through on our commute, whether we’re aware of them or not.

Title page of the Mapping the Movimineto ARCGIS StoryMap.

The University of San Antonio Libraries’ project, Mapping the Movimiento, reveals a layer of San Antonio’s history during the Mexican American Civil Rights movement in the ’60s and ’70s, by mapping and contextualizing 15 significant places for activists. Though these places are known within the community, this project ensures that the history lived in these buildings is relived and remembered through an ArcGIS StoryMap. This tool combines geographic information systems (GIS) with multimedia elements to create a digital storytelling medium. It hosts built-in mapping capabilities, but also allows users to upload maps from other sources. Users then bring the map to life by uploading videos, images, information, and whatever else helps contextualize significant places. This creates a simple yet effective multimedia map, which works well for public history projects such as this one.

Map view of the significant spots identified in the project.

As one scrolls through the StoryMap, this layer of San Antonio history comes alive. While the map of the city that they show is a modern one, the archival pictures that accompany each slide superimpose the past onto these places. The beauty of this project is that it achieves coexistence of the past and the present, not relegating these stories as bound for dusty archives and textbooks (though I quite enjoy a dusty archive). They stretch this history to the present, making us reckon with what is hiding beneath the buildings we think we know.

One such example is the Munguía Printers – a printshop owned by José Rómulo Munguía and Carolina Malpica de Munguía. They printed Chicano newsletters that no one else would, and their shop became an important meeting spot for activists. It stopped operations in the early 2000s, though their influence remains strong in San Antonio. Today, the building is an office and workspace, renovated by Rómulo’s grandson. He built upon the legacy of his grandfather, adding a layer to the building’s history and significance.

Munguía Printers slide.

The StoryMap is narrated by John Philips Santos, adding an almost casual air to the project, as if there was someone in the car telling you about a building you’re driving past, and bringing memories out of hiding. Archival images cycle through as he narrates – the building itself, people protesting, newspapers – adding visual context of how people inhabited these places. Through these pictures, we not only get to know the building, but also see and imagine the liveliness within them.

This project brings together history, memory, and archives to make an accessible public history project, letting viewers explore San Antonio’s intertwined history, told with the help of archivists, librarians, and activists. Though many of the buildings are well known, this project dissects and shows the history cemented by those who came before us, who walked those streets before we did. It encourages us to inquire what is within those buildings we pass on our way to work, to pay more attention, and perhaps to visit our archives to remember, rediscover, and reconstruct versions of our cities that we may not have known before.

Related material in UTL collections:

Barrera, Baldemar James. “We Want Better Education!” : The 1960s Chicano Student Movement, School Walkouts, and the Quest for Educational Reform in South Texas / James B. Barrera. First edition., Texas A&M University Press, 2024.

Economy Furniture Company Strike Collection, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

García, Mario T., and Ellen McCracken, editors. Rewriting the Chicano Movement : New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era / Edited by Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken. The University of Arizona Press, 2021.

Orozco, Cynthia. Agent of Change : Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist / Cynthia E. Orozco. University of Texas Press, 2020, https://doi.org/10.7560/319864.

Rómulo Munguía Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

[1] Azadeh Lak and Pantea Hakimian, “Collective Memory and Urban Regeneration in Urban Spaces: Reproducing Memories in Baharestan Square, City of Tehran, Iran,” City, Culture and Society 18 (September 2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2019.100290.

[2] Cristian Olmos Herrera et al., “Mapas Parlantes: Collective Visual Methods to Map and Re−/Construct Urban Memories,” Community Development Journal, November 13, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsaf030.

Acquisitions/Foreign Travel, Area Studies, Collections, Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, Global Studies, Humanities & Liberal Arts, Uncategorized

Down and Out in Lisbon and London: Antiquarian Books and Digital Humanities in Europe

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Thanks to the generous support of the Center for European Studies and the UT Libraries, I was recently able to travel to London, England and Lisbon, Portugal.  On my trip, I had the chance to attend a scholarly conference, acquire unique materials to add to UTL’s collections, network with academics, vendors, and librarians, and purchase books for the UT Libraries’ collections.

A street in London lined with bookstores containing antiquarian and rare books.
A street in London lined with bookstores containing antiquarian and rare books.

My time in London was an invaluable opportunity to build stronger connections with an international cohort of colleagues. For example, I met with one of the UT Libraries’ vendors who I work with to procure rare materials on early twentieth century European politics. The vendor I met with, Carl Slienger, frequently supplies us with items not held by any other North American libraries, making the materials he sources very important for our distinctive holdings of pamphlets and other propagandistic literature, as well as antiquarian books that enhance our holdings of rare and unique European occult and spiritualist materials. I also met with a colleague at the British Library to discuss coding workflows and best practices for working with digital materials. Meeting with my colleague at the British Library was likewise very beneficial, as much of my work involving digital methodologies is focused on programming in Python and other languages, and I am currently supervising a project focused on using Python to automate digital archival workflows.

Ian standing outside of the British Library.
Ian outside of the British Library.

In Lisbon, I attended and presented at the The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Digital Humanities 2025 conference.  My poster presentation focused on software packages I have written  in the Rust programming language to support multilingual computational approaches to linguistics and digital humanities. My poster highlighted three software packages: a package for performing lemmatization, a key natural language processing task, on text; a package for assessing the readability of a text containing a variety of algorithms to choose from; and a package to perform stylometric analysis on text. They were all built with multilingual support in mind, and as such are specifically designed to move outside of an Anglocentric paradigm often found in technologies for natural language processing and textual analysis, creating new opportunities for multilingual and non-English textual analysis and digital humanities. Beyond my own presentation, I was able to  attend talks on other digital research methodologies throughout the conference. Being able to attend talks by colleagues from all around the globe was both invigorating and rewarding, and an invaluable way to stay on top of the current research being done in the digital humanities. I also took the opportunity to acquire a small amount of zines while in Lisbon, adding to our collection of unique materials that we would not be able to purchase without undergoing a foreign acquisitions trip.

The poster session area at the DH 2025 conference in Lisbon.
The poster session area at the DH 2025 conference in Lisbon.

This trip allowed me the opportunity to represent UT Austin internationally to a diverse group of colleagues, and I’m grateful that I was able to serve the Libraries in such a capacity. I look forward to building on our distinctive holdings and further expanding UT’s collections while continuing to work on using digital methodologies to enhance accessibility for research and open source software.

Uncategorized

Historic Maps, New Coordinates

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Machine Learning Meets the Sanborn Maps

In the digital age, historical maps hold a wealth of information, but unlocking their full potential for geospatial analysis and historic research often requires labor-intensive georeferencing. An innovative project the University of Texas Libraries is evolving this process through the power of machine learning.

The Libraries boast a vast cartographic collection in the Perry-Castañeda Library Maps Collection including thousands of items that have been scanned for online and digital use, yet only a fraction of them are georeferenced, hampering their utility for scholars and researchers. Recognizing the immense challenge of manually georeferencing tens of thousands of maps, the Libraries have turned to cutting-edge technology to automate this arduous task.

Georeferencing – the process of assigning geographic coordinates to a map image – is essential for accurately situating maps on the Earth’s surface within GIS (Geographic Information System) software. Traditionally, this has been painstaking manual work, but the emergence of machine learning offers a promising alternative.

Enter the proof-of-concept project spearheaded by geospatial and data specialists at the Libraries, which focuses on automating the georeferencing of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps–a pivotal component of their collection. Sanborn maps provide invaluable insights into urban development and infrastructure from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

To tackle this ambitious undertaking, the project team developed a custom annotation tool to identify street intersections on a small subset of maps from the collection. Leveraging object detection models trained on machine learning algorithms, the tool automatically detects these intersections, streamlining the georeferencing process.

Optical character recognition (OCR) technology is then employed to extract street labels associated with the intersections identified by the object detection model. This data is then cross-referenced with a modern street intersection dataset derived from OpenStreetMap, enabling the precise georeferencing of the historical maps.

Remarkably, the automated process has already achieved a significant milestone, successfully georeferencing 14% of the Sanborn maps with a level of accuracy comparable to manual methods. This initial success paves the way for scaling up the project to encompass the entire collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, as well as extending the approach to other map collections in the future.

Looking ahead, the project team is ideating enhancements of the process and further refining its accuracy. Continuous refinement of the machine learning models, improvements to the OCR process for reading street labels, and collaboration with other experts in the field are just a few avenues being explored to optimize the georeferencing workflow.

In an era where data-driven insights are increasingly shaping our understanding of the past, initiatives like the Libraries’ machine learning project offer a glimpse into the transformative potential of technology in historical research. By harnessing the power of machine learning, the Libraries are discovering ways to unlock the spatial dimensions of history and illuminate new pathways for scholarship and discovery.

Read a research article about the project at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15420353.2025.2462737

Benson Latin American Collection, Exhibits, Global Studies, Uncategorized

An Adventure in El Paso, Texas

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One of my favorite parts of being a librarian is the opportunity to participate in community engagement projects. So when the opportunity to work with Albert A. Palacios on a traveling exhibit as one of my rotations, I immediately said yes. The exhibit was a collaboration with the University of Texas at El Paso’s C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, which was especially exciting as a UTEP alumnus. This is part of a long standing partnership made possible by a U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center grant. Our exhibit brought together holdings from the Benson Latin American Collection, the C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, and the Municipal Archive of Saltillo in a joint physical and digital exhibit about the Mexican Revolution.

A Fight for Democracy exhibit at UTEP
Intertwined Destinies: El Paso and Northern Mexico exhibit at UTEP.

Albert and I traveled to El Paso in May 2025 to finally see the fruits of our labor. When we got to the library’s third floor, Claudia Rivers (Director of the C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections) was hard at work putting the finishing touches on her exhibit. The U.S.-Mexico border played a big role in the Mexican Revolution, which means that UTEP has a lot of special objects in their archives. One of these objects is a commemorative cigar from when Porfirio Díaz and William Howard Taft met at the border in 1909. It was an incredible experience to see these first hand, and to have people from the community view these as well.

Items included in the exhibit.

The next day was dedicated to digital scholarship workshops to local scholars. We had participants from all over the El Paso-Juárez region, and an archivist even drove three hours from Alpine to attend! Elisabet Takehana, Director of UTEP’s Center of the Digital Humanities, taught stylometry using the stylo package in R. Sergio Morales, LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Graduate Research Assistant and Latin American Studies Master’s student, taught ArcGIS’s Online and StoryMap tools for presenting spatial research using the official photographs from Mexico’s 1910 independence centennial celebration. And finally, I taught how to use Voyant Tools and UDPipe for text analysis using telegrams between Francisco Villa and Lázaro de la Garza. By the end of the day, participants had gotten hands-on experience with all of these different digital humanities tools and processes.

Sergio Morales teaching ArcGIS Online and StoryMaps tools.
Ana A. Rico teaching text analysis.

After the workshops, we headed upstairs to the third floor once again for the exhibit opening. The exhibit curated by Claudia Rivers was incredible – showcasing a silk print of Porfirio Díaz, a camera from the early 1900s, and portraits of Francisco I. Madero and his wife which were taken by an El Paso photographer. Though our exhibit didn’t get there on time for the opening (Albert and I learned how to roll with the punches) we were able to direct people to the digital version of the exhibit. All in all, it was a day full of learning and celebration, as well as making connections to scholars in the area.

People viewing exhibits during the opening reception.

Finally, on the third day, our exhibit arrived and we put it up for students, faculty, and the public to enjoy! It was a joy to share the Benson Latin American Collection with a wider audience. The exhibit, A Fight for Democracy: The First Years of the Mexican Revolution, will be displayed at UTEP for the summer and then travel to the El Paso Border Heritage Center in the fall. A second copy will circulate through the Austin Public Library later this year.

Albert A. Palacios and Ana A. Rico in front of their exhibit.

Acknowledgements
This initiative would not have been possible without the support of the following individuals and sponsorships:

C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, The University of Texas at El Paso
● Claudia Rivers, Head
● Susannah Holliday, Assistant Head
● Gina Stevenson, Photo and Processing Archivist

Center of the Digital Humanities, The University of Texas at El Paso
● Elisabet Takehana, Director

Municipal Archive of Saltillo
● Olivia Strozzi, Director
● Iván Vartan Muñoz Cotera, Head of Outreach

LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections
● Melissa Guy, Director, Benson Latin American Collection
● Ryan Lynch, Head of Special Collections
● Jennifer Mailloux, Graphic Designer (special thanks)
● Adela Pineda Franco, LLILAS Director & Lozano Long Endowed Professor
● Theresa Polk, Head of Digital Initiatives
● Ramya Iyer, Grants and Contracts Specialist
● Susanna Sharpe, Communications Coordinator (special thanks)
● Cindy Garza, Accountant
● Leah Long, Administrative Manager

Sponsors
● U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center Title VI Grant
● LLILAS Benson Collaborative Funds

Acquisitions/Foreign Travel, Benson Latin American Collection, Events, Uncategorized

Memory, Archives, and the Power of Storytelling with Cristina Rivera Garza

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On April 14, the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection welcomed acclaimed author Cristina Rivera Garza for an evening of reflection, conversation, and celebration marking the acquisition of her literary archive. Rivera Garza – Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” and a MacArthur Genius Fellow.

The event drew a full house to honor the arrival of Rivera Garza’s papers and the stories they preserve. Attendees had an opportunity to view a curated selection from Rivera Garza’s archive, which includes manuscripts, letters and documents related to her writing and the life of her sister, Liliana, whose murder and legacy are the focus of “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” Rivera Garza’s prize-winning memoir.

Rivera Garza opened the evening with a brief talk about the process that led to the placement of her papers at the Benson. She recalled the moment, following the completion of her memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer, when she realized she lacked the tools to properly preserve Liliana’s letters, notes, books and other ephemera. Conversations with Benson staff helped her transition from caring for the materials privately to entrusting them to an institutional home.

She dedicated her remarks to her late father, Antonio Rivera, who recently passed away. Tracing his extraordinary life – from his Indigenous roots and refugee migration during a historic drought to earning a PhD in agricultural sciences in Sweden – she honored his devotion to memory and preservation. Antonio, like Liliana, saved everything: letters, photographs, telegrams and even short stories. Rivera Garza credited him with instilling the values of legacy and documentation that ultimately inspired her literary work.

Rivera Garza described archives as sacred, transformative spaces where “the living and the dead interact,” likening them to cemeteries that enable spiritual communion and emotional resurrection. She recounted the profound experience of opening the boxes of Liliana’s belongings, which included handwritten notes, origami-folded letters and scribbles in book margins – tangible remnants that allowed her to reconstruct her sister’s story and, in doing so, become a writer.

She closed her remarks with a call to action, framing archives as instruments of “restorative justice.” Though they may not always bring perpetrators to court, archives preserve truth, resist forgetting and bear witness to gender violence and femicide. In an era of disinformation, she argued, archives remain steadfast between oblivion and collective memory. Her parting wish: “Let archives do their breathing, and allow them to revive ourselves.”

The evening continued with a dialogue between the author and Dr. Celeste González de Bustamante, director of the Center for Global Media at the Moody College of Communications. The conversation explored the author’s writing process, the decision to withhold Liliana’s image from the English-language cover and the role of feminist mobilizations in shaping a new vocabulary for justice. Rivera Garza shared that much of “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” was informed by telephone conversations – intimate, unrecorded calls during the pandemic – with Liliana’s friends, whose memories form the emotional scaffolding of the book.

The discussion touched on broader issues of gender violence and femicide in Mexico and beyond. With an impunity rate for femicide exceeding 95% in Mexico, Rivera Garza described her writing as a way to confront silence, institutional erasure and the bureaucratic labyrinth faced by those seeking justice. She discussed the language born of feminist movements that made her book possible and necessary – a language that gives voice to victims rather than perpetrators.

With themes spanning grief, justice, family history and the evolving role of archives in a digital age, the evening served as a powerful reminder of the significance of preserving stories – especially those often left untold. Rivera Garza’s archive joins the Benson’s vast literary collections, ensuring that her words, and Liliana’s, will continue to inspire, provoke and bear witness for generations to come.

Watch video from the event.

Benson Latin American Collection, Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, Global Studies, LLILAS Benson, Uncategorized

Spanish Paleography + Digital Humanities Institute Focuses Research on Colonial Texts

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Scholars and graduate students from institutions across the country gathered at the Benson Latin American Collection for the Spanish Paleography + Digital Humanities Institute. The immersive three-day program provided intensive training in reading and transcribing Spanish manuscripts from the 16th to 18th centuries while introducing participants to digital humanities tools that enhance historical research.

Funded by  LLILAS’s U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI Program and the Excellence Fund for Technology and Development in Latin America, the institute sought to equip researchers with specialized skills to navigate colonial texts, visualize historical data, and foster a collaborative academic community. The event was spearheaded by LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Coordinator Albert A. Palacios, and brought together a cohort of graduate students and faculty members specializing in history, literature, linguistics, and related disciplines.

The institute focused on three key objectives: providing paleography training, introducing participants to digital humanities tools, and fostering a collaborative research network. Participants engaged in hands-on workshops to develop their ability to accurately read and transcribe colonial manuscripts. They also received instruction on open-source technologies for text extraction, geospatial analysis, and network visualization. The program fostered a community of scholars who will continue sharing insights and resources beyond the institute.

Participants had the opportunity to work with historical materials, including royal documents, inquisition records, religious texts, and economic transactions. Case studies were examined through paleography working groups, where scholars collaboratively deciphered difficult handwriting styles and abbreviations.

To apply their newly acquired digital humanities skills, each participant developed a pilot research project using Spanish colonial manuscripts. These projects utilized handwritten text recognition (HTR) technology, geographical text analysis, and data visualization tools to enhance historical inquiry. The final day of the institute featured a lightning round of presentations, allowing scholars to showcase their preliminary findings and discuss future applications.

This year’s participants hailed from universities across the U.S., including the University of Chicago, the University of North Texas, Columbia University, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of California-Santa Barbara, Purdue University, City College of New York, West Liberty University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of California-Merced. The interdisciplinary nature of the group enriched discussions, providing diverse perspectives on archival research and manuscript interpretation.

A highlight of the institute was the introduction and use of the handwritten text recognition (HTR) model the LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Office trained and recently launched on 17th and 18th century Spanish handwriting preserved at the Benson. This innovation is expected to significantly accelerate the study of colonial-era documents and democratize access to these historical resources.

Additionally, the program provided a comprehensive list of recommended paleography resources, including books, digital collections, and online tools to support continued scholarship in Spanish manuscript studies.

Palacios is leading an online Spanish version of the institute for participants worldwide this spring and fall. He will be leading another onsite institute June 4-6, 2025.The demand for the LLILAS Benson Spanish Paleography + Digital Humanities Institute in the Colonial Latin Americanist field underscores the growing interest in merging traditional archival research with computational methodologies. By equipping scholars with both paleographic expertise and digital tools, the institute is paving the way for innovative research on the Spanish Empire and its historical records.

Benson Latin American Collection, Events, LLILAS Benson, Uncategorized

Former Chilean President Bachelet Champions Women’s Leadership and Equality in Public Address

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The Honorable Michelle Bachelet, former President of Chile and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, addressed a crowd at the Benson Latin American Collection on October 16. Part of the Mary Ann Faulkner Distinguished Lecture Series in Latin American Public Affairs and Politics, the event was hosted by the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies (LLILAS).

Bachelet made history as the first woman to serve as President of Chile, holding office for two non-consecutive terms (2006–2010 and 2014–2018). Born in 1951 in Santiago, Chile, she grew up in a politically active family and pursued a career in medicine, specializing in pediatrics and public health. Her life took a dramatic turn during Chile’s military dictatorship when her father, a general loyal to President Salvador Allende, was arrested and died in custody, and she herself was detained and tortured. After returning from exile in the 1980s, Bachelet became a prominent advocate for democracy and human rights. She later entered politics, serving as Minister of Health and Minister of National Defense before ascending to the presidency. Following her time in office, she was appointed as the first Executive Director of UN Women and later served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2018 to 2022, continuing her lifelong commitment to social justice and equality.

Before the evening event, Bachelet visited the Benson’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room, where she was provided an introduction to the archive with a viewing of rare materials led by Benson Director Melissa Guy, Head of User Services AJ Johnson and Head of Special Collections Ryan Lynch.

The evening talk began with an introduction from LLILAS Director Adela Pineda Franco, who underscored Bachelet’s influence on democratic governance and human rights worldwide, then Bachelet launched into a talk focused on women’s leadership and gender equality across the Americas, set against a backdrop of rising authoritarianism and rights erosion. Reflecting on setbacks for women’s rights globally, Bachelet touched on issues such as recent limitations on reproductive rights in the U.S., elimination of Argentina’s Ministry of Women and gendered restrictions in Afghanistan. She argued that women’s rights must remain integral to discussions on democracy, noting that societal progress is hindered when women’s contributions are overlooked.

Bachelet also explored the impact of artificial intelligence on women’s employment, emphasizing the need for a human rights framework to prevent biased AI systems. She called for greater diversity in AI development, pointing to a male-dominated tech sector where gender biases could impact future job markets.

Immediately following her address, Dean JR DeShazo of the LBJ School of Public Affairs interviewed Bachelet on the challenges and progress in women’s leadership and gender equality in the Americas. Bachelet emphasized the importance of inclusive policies and the need for continuous efforts to address systemic inequalities. She highlighted her experiences in overcoming political and social barriers, underscoring the role of resilience and strategic optimism in advancing human rights and gender parity. The discussion also touched upon the impact of global crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, on women’s rights, and the necessity for collaborative international approaches to safeguard and promote gender equality.

Bachelet concluded the evening by encouraging attendees to champion gender equality as a foundational element of democratic integrity. Her call to action extended to the university’s community, encouraging students, faculty and future leaders to break barriers and advocate for equitable representation.

iSchool, People, Uncategorized

Libraries Kick Off Fall Mentorship Program

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The University of Texas Libraries is pleased to announce the launch of this fall’s iSchool Mentorship Program.

The UTL-iSchool Mentor Program is a joint program occurring each Fall and Spring semester between the UT Libraries and the iSchool Career Services Office. It is a voluntary program for second year graduate iSchool students to pair with librarians to learn more about the experience of being a librarian. The focus is mainly on the academic track, so that mentees can find out what liaisons (or subject) librarians do, what archivists do, what’s involved in metadata work, or library administration. The goal is for mentees and mentors to meet 3 times either virtually or in-person over the semester. 

Liaison Librarian for Communication Meryl Brodsky fills the coordinator role as the iSchool Liaison. A committee composed of staff professionals works to match students with a librarian who works in the area of interest to candidates – instruction, metadata, subject librarianship, the administrative track, or others. Occasionally the program is able to match candidates with special interest placements, such as in film librarianship. 

This semester’s class is composed of seven students. Five are paired with librarians from Libraries: including librarians from Teaching & Learning Services, from Stewardship, from the Benson Library, from Scholarly Resources, and from the Resident program. One is paired with a librarian from Austin Public Library. And for the first time, one mentee was paired with a librarian from the Law School.

Participants can talk with their mentor about the day-to-day work, and may shadow librarians on a chat reference shift or a research consultation, attend a librarian candidate presentation, discuss professional associations, decode job descriptions, or ask questions about the profession in general. The Mentor program is not a path to getting a job at the UT Libraries, but it could help to generate some ideas for Capstone projects, and help participants to network with library professionals.

The Mentor program is student-centered, which means that mentees direct it by asking questions or asking to meet people from different parts of the library or bringing their interests to the conversation.

“A mentorship really goes two ways,” says Meryl Brodsky. “The iSchool students learn about our jobs and the role we play on campus. They share their professional interests and what they hope to accomplish with us, and that shows us where our profession is headed. It’s a validating experience for both sides.”

Uncategorized

Intemperate & Unchaste Digital Exhibit

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Willem Borkgren is a Scholars Lab Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) in his second year of the School of Information’s MSIS program. During the 2023-2024 academic year, he undertook a Digital Scholarship Project as part of his GRA role. Using tools in the Scholars Lab, he researched a comparative literary analysis of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The outcomes of this analysis are available in a digital exhibit “Intemperate & Unchaste.”

When I had the opportunity to pursue a Digital Scholarship Project in the Scholars Lab, I was eager to apply the new digital tools available to me on materials I love. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has been the subject of literary discourse for centuries, canonized in controversy, with fair points made for its landmark importance in women’s authorship in English literature but also its casual colonial attitudes that reduce marginalized identities to symbols. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1960s retelling of the events of Eyre but from the perspective of the abused wife of Rochester (Antoinette in WSS, Bertha in JE). Rhys’s own feelings of liminality about her intersectional identity color her characters, and critics have argued she underwrites black characters in her story just as Brontë had.

     My goal in this project was to apply modern quantitative literary analysis to these texts with the purpose of evaluating how these texts interact with themes of gender and empire, how they compare in their handling of these topics, and where a modern reader may find them lacking. From these outcomes, I hope to explore their canonicity in spite of their limitations as well as the progression of women’s authorship in English literature.

The overhead scanner in the ScanTech Studio.

     I used the tools and resources of the Scholars Lab from start to finish on this project. I began by digitizing a copy of Sargasso Sea I brought from the PCL stacks to the Scholars Lab. Before this I was connected with Colleen Lyon, our Head of Scholarly Communications who also advises researchers on copyright. On her recommendation, I limited my digital copy of Rhys to 3 sections of the novel to remain well within fair-use. With that in mind, I utilized the Scan Tech Studio’s overhead scanner to digitize the selections. With the book imaged, I could send the files directly to Google Docs, where I used the built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to transform the images into text. In future projects, I would consider a more robust OCR tool as, despite the convenience of the scanner-to-Google-Drive workflow, the OCR’d pages required a good amount of manual cleaning. I downloaded the pages as plain text, then accessed a plain text copy of Jane Eyre from Project Gutenberg. I imported the texts to RStudio, where I cleaned them of stopwords using a custom list containing the Creole patois of Sargasso Sea as well as the Snowball list of standard stopwords. The text was then tokenized for analysis. The tidyverse modules and GGPlot2 were used heavily in my scripting for text mining, the former for organizing data and the latter for visualizing it. With my data visualized, I moved onto Scalar to create my digital exhibit.

Bar graph of words within 5 of ‘dress’ in WSS.

     I conducted my analysis in R Studio, scripting to find skipgrams of thematically significant words and assess their sentiment. Ngrams are word phrases where one word is within ‘n’ of a target word, and skipgrams are Ngrams where words between the target word and its pair are skipped over rather than maintained. These are useful in literary analysis as they can indicate how a word or idea is connotated within a text that may not be immediately apparent with a traditional close-read. They also are useful in filtering for words whose meanings are changed by a negating modifier. I represented the outcomes of these skipgrams in word clouds and bar graphs, using size to indicate the frequency of words and thus the relative importance of their connotation. In this way, the juxtaposed contradictions of Eyre and the cynicism of Sargasso Sea can instantly be visually compared.

This word cloud shows ngrams of marriage words in both texts. Larger words are more frequent. Dark blue represents ‘husband’ & ‘groom’ skipgrams in JE, dark red for WSS. Likewise, light blue represents ‘wife’ & ‘bride’ in JE, which are pink for WSS.

From these outcomes and more, I conclude that Rhys is writing back to the assumptions made in Brontë’s work with a more nuanced and modern perspective, but is still limited by her position in time and relative privilege of the white Creole perspective in a Caribbean context. Elements like Antoinette’s status as the daughter of former slave owners and her wealth compared to Tia’s fetishized poverty do indicate some acknowledgment of this privilege.

Skipgrams of 5 for the words “Slave” and “Servant.” Note that ‘slave’ did not occur in the limited selection of JE used in this project.

     I hope that this post has piqued your interest and that you will explore my digital exhibit on Scalar. If it has, I invite you to visit the Scholars Lab and see what research you can come up with. From digitization to scripting to publication, all the resources I used in the scope of my Digital Scholarship Project can be found there! If you are curious about any of these tools or spaces, schedule a consultation with the Scholars Lab staff and we’ll help you accomplish your research goals.

From the Director, Uncategorized

Welcome Back!

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Dear Longhorns,

Vice Provost and Director Lorraine J. Haricombe.

As we embark on a new academic year, I am thrilled to welcome both new faces and familiar friends back to campus. This is truly my favorite time of year, filled with the excitement of new beginnings and the joy of reconnecting with our vibrant community.

Over the summer, our team has been hard at work preparing the Libraries to serve you better. I’m excited to announce the completion of significant renovations at the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL). You’ll notice new furniture in many of our common spaces, fresh paint, and new carpeting that together create a more inviting and comfortable environment. Additionally, we’ve added new shaded seating on the plaza to offer some relief from the Texas sun, making PCL an even better place to study, collaborate, and gather.

But PCL is just one library among many. We have a network of spaces across the Forty Acres, each with its own unique offerings. Whether it’s the Life Science Library in the iconic Tower, the Benson Latin American Collection in Sid Richardson Hall, the Physics/Mathematics/Astronomy Library (PMA) and the McKinney Library in north campus near Dean Keaton, the Walter Geology Library at the Jackson School, or the Fine Arts Library near the stadium that includes the Foundry makerspace, there’s a space for everyone. And don’t miss the newly renovated Classics Library in Waggener Hall—it’s well worth a visit. Whatever your style, whatever your community, we have a space for you!

Our global studies librarians have also been traveling far and wide, acquiring new and rare items to add to our collections. Collections work like this, which has been ongoing for over 140 years, ensures that we continue to provide the best and most effective resources to support your academic journey.

At the Libraries, we are committed to helping you succeed in your academic journey. Our librarians are here to assist you with your research needs, whether you’re selecting a topic, finding the right resources, or ensuring ethical use of information. You can reach out to us through our online chat service, via email, through online guides, in classes, or by scheduling a one-on-one consultation. We also provide access to a vast array of materials, both in our libraries and online, that you can begin exploring at lib.utexas.edu. Need help navigating our system? We’re here to guide you every step of the way.

The Libraries are also some of the best study spaces on campus. PCL is open 24/7 during the regular semester, offering a secure and welcoming environment with quiet and collaborative spaces to suit your study style. Computer labs are available to all students, with additional specialized software at PCL and the Fine Arts Library (FAL) to support your assignments, and printing services available for a small fee. You can find more information on our locations, hours, and services on our website.

As we begin this new year together, I want to remind you that these are your libraries. Our experts are here to help you navigate the challenges you may face, offering the spaces, services, and friendly support you need to succeed in your work at UT.

Here’s to a successful and inspiring academic year ahead!

Hook ’em!