Panel reminder — From Dissertation to Book: Navigating the Publication Process

Announcing a virtual event titled “From Dissertation to Book: Navigating the Publication Process.” The event is scheduled for November 12, 2024, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. via Zoom. The flyer prominently features the headshots of three speakers: • Raina Polivka • Stephanie L. Canizales • Yuanxiao Xu In the bottom right corner, there is a QR code labeled “Sign up!” for registration, along with a link to sign up. The event is hosted by the UCB Library Scholarly Communication & Information Policy office, with contact information provided. The flyer has a red and black color scheme, with yellow name labels under the speakers’ photos.

Date/Time: Tuesday, November 12, 2024, 11:00am–12:30pm
Location: Zoom. RSVP.

Hear from a panel of experts—an acquisitions editor, a first-time book author, and an author rights expert—about the process of turning your dissertation into a book. You’ll come away from this panel discussion with practical advice about revising your dissertation, writing a book proposal, approaching editors, signing your first contract, and navigating the peer review and publication process.

We’ll be joined by:

 


Disability Awareness Month 2024

Disability Awareness Month 2024

Celebrate Disability Awareness Month by exploring powerful stories and insights from disabled authors. Discover more diverse perspectives that inspire and educate on UCB Overdrive!

 


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A&H Data: Bay Area Publishing and Structured Data

Last post, I promised to talk about using structured data with a dataset focused on 1950s Bay Area publishing. To get into that topic, I’m going to talk about 1) setting out with a research question as well as 2) data discovery, and 3) data organization, in order to do 4) initial mapping.

Background to my Research

When I moved to the Bay Area, I (your illustrious Literatures and Digital Humanities Librarian) started exploring UC Berkeley’s collections. I wandered through the Doe Library’s circulating collections and started talking to our Bancroft staff about the special library and archive’s foci. As expected, one of UC Berkeley’s collecting areas is California publishing, with a special emphasis on poetry.

Allen Ginsberg depicted with wings in copy for a promotional piece.
Mock-up of ad for books by Allen Ginsberg, City Lights Books Records, 1953-1970, Bancroft Library.

In fact, some of Bancroft’s oft-used materials are the City Light Books collections (link to finding aids in the Online Archive of California) that include some of Allen Ginsberg’s pre-publication drafts of “Howl” and original copies of Howl and Other Poems. You may already know about that poem because you like poetry, or because you watch everything with Daniel Radcliffe in it (IMDB on the 2013 Kill your Darlings). This is, after all, the very poem that led to the seminal trial that influenced U.S. free speech and obscenity laws (often called The Howl Obscenity Trial) . The Bancroft collections have quite a bit about that trial as well as some of Ginsberg’s correspondence with Lawrence Ferlinghetti (poet, bookstore owner, and publisher) during the harrowing legal case. (You can a 2001 discussion with Ferlinghetti on the subject here.)

Research Question

Interested in learning more about Bay Area publishing in general and the period in which Ginsberg’s book was written in particular, I decided to look into the Bay Area publishing environment during the 1950s and now (2020s), starting with the early period. I wanted a better sense of the environment in general as well as public access to books, pamphlets, and other printed material. In particular, I wanted to start with the number of publishers and where they were.

Data Discovery

For a non-digital, late 19th and 20th century era, one of the easiest places to start getting a sense of mainstream businesses is to look in city directories. There was a sweet spot in an era of mass printing and industrialization in which city directories were one of the most reliable sources of this kind of information, as the directory companies were dedicated to finding as much information as possible about what was in different urban areas and where men and businesses were located. The directories, as a guide to finding business, people, and places, were organized in a clear, columned text, highly standardized and structured in order to promote usability.

Raised in an era during which city directories were still a normal thing to have at home, I already knew these fat books existed. Correspondingly, I set forth to find copies of the directories from the 1950s when “Howl” first appeared. If I hadn’t already known, I might have reached out to my librarian to get suggestions (for you, that might be me).

I knew that some of the best places to find material like city directories were usually either a city library or a historical society. I could have gone straight to the San Francisco Public Library’s website to see if they had the directories, but I decided to go to Google (i.e., a giant web index) and search for (historic san francisco city directories). That search took me straight to the SFPL’s San Francisco City Directories Online (link here).

On the site, I selected the volumes I was interested in, starting with Polk’s Directory for 1955-56. The SFPL pages shot me over to the Internet Archive and I downloaded the volumes I wanted from there.

Once the directory was on my computer, I opened it and took a look through the “yellow pages” (i.e., pages with information sorted by business type) for “publishers.”

Page from a city directory with columns of company names and corresponding addresses.
Note the dense columns of text almost overlap. From R.L. Polk & Co, Polk’s San Francisco City Directory, vol. 1955–1956 (San Francisco, Calif. : R.L. Polk & Co., 1955), Internet Archive. | Public Domain.

Glancing through the listings, I noted that the records for “publishers” did not list City Light Books. Flipped back to “book sellers,” I found it. That meant that other booksellers could be publishers as well. And, regardless, those booksellers were spaces where an audience could acquire books (shocker!) and therefore relevant. Considering the issue, I also looked at the list for “printers,” in part to capture some of the self-publishing spaces.

I now had three structured lists from one directory with dozens of names. Yet, the distances within the book and inability to reorganize made them difficult to consider together. Furthermore, I couldn’t map them with the structure available in the directory. In order to do what I wanted with them (i.e., meet my research goals), I needed to transform them into a machine readable data set.

Creating a Data Set

Machine Readable

I started by doing a one-to-one copy. I took the three lists published in the directory and ran OCR across them in Adobe Acrobat Professional (UC Berkeley has a subscription; for OA access I recommend Transkribus or Tesseract), and then copied the relevant columns into a Word document.

Data Cleaning

The OCR copy of the list was a horrifying mess with misspellings, cut-off words, Ss understood as 8s, and more. Because this was a relatively small amount of data, I took the time to clean the text manually. Specifically, I corrected typos and then set up the text to work with in Excel (Google Sheets would have also worked) by:

  • creating line breaks between entries,
  • putting tabs between the name of each institution and corresponding address

Once I’d cleaned the data, I copied the text into Excel. The line breaks functioned to tell Excel where to break rows and the tabs where to understand columns. Meaning:

  • Each institution had its own row.
  • The names of the institutions and their addresses were in different columns.

Having that information in different spaces would allow me to sort the material either by address or back to its original organization by company name.

Adding Additional Information

I had, however, three different types of institutions—Booksellers, Printers, and Publishers—that I wanted to be able to keep separate. With that in mind, I added a column for EntryType (written as one word because many programs have issues with understanding column headers with spaces) and put the original directory headings into the relevant rows.

Knowing that I also wanted to map the data, I also added a column for “City” and another for “State” as the GIS (i.e., mapping) programs I planned to use wouldn’t automatically know which urban areas I meant. For these, I wrote the name of the city (i.e., “San Francisco”) and then the state (i.e., “California”) in their respective columns and autofilled the information.

Next, for record keeping purposes, I added columns for where I got the information, the page I got it from, and the URL for where I downloaded it. That information simultaneously served for me as a reminder but also as a pointer for anyone else who might want to look at the data and see the source directly.

I put in a column for Org/ID for later, comparative use (I’ll talk more about this one in a further post,) and then added columns for Latitude and Longitude for eventual use.

Page from a city directory with columns of company names and corresponding addresses.
The column headers here are: Years; Section; Company; Address; City; State; PhoneNumber; Latitude; Longitude; Org; Title; PageNumber; Repository; URL. Click on the chart to see the file.

Finally, I saved my data with a filename that I could easily use to find the data again. In this case, I named it “BayAreaPublishers1955.” I made sure to save the data as an Excel file (i.e., .xmlx) and Comma Separated Value file (i.e., .csv) for use and preservation respectively. I also uploaded the file into Google Drive as a Google Sheet so you could look at it.

Initial Mapping of the Data

With that clean dataset, I headed over to Google’s My Maps (mymaps.google.com) to see if my dataset looked good and didn’t show locations in Los Angeles or other spaces. I chose Google Maps for my test because it is one of the easiest GIS programs to use

  1. because many people are already used to the Google interface
  2. the program will look up latitude and longitude based on address
  3. it’s one of the most restrictive, meaning users don’t get overwhelmed with options.

Heading to the My Maps program, I created a “new” map by clicking the “Create a new map” icon in the upper, left hand corner of the interface.

From there, I uploaded my CSV file as a layer. Take a look at the resulting map:

Image of the My Mpas backend with pins from the 1955-56 polk directory, colors indicating publishers or booksellers.
Click on the map for an interactive version. Note that I’ve set the pins to differ in column by “type.”

The visualization highlights the centrality of the 1955 San Francisco publishing world, with its concentration of publishing companies and bookstores around Mission Street. Buying books also necessitated going downtown, but once there, there was a world of information at one’s fingertips.

Add in information gleaned from scholarship and other sources about book imports, custom houses, and post offices, and one can start to think about international book trades and how San Francisco was hooked into it.

I’ll talk more about how to use Google’s My Maps in the next post in two weeks!


Workshop reminder — Managing & Maximizing Your Scholarly Impact

Event flyer with purple and white background the title 'Managing & Maximizing Your Scholarly Impact.' There's a colorful "open access" lock logo in the lower left and the Berkeley Library logo in the lower right.

Date/Time: Tuesday, October 15, 2024, 11:00am–12:00pm
Location: Zoom. RSVP.

This workshop will provide you with practical strategies and tips for promoting your scholarship, increasing your citations, and monitoring your success. You’ll also learn how to understand metrics, use scholarly networking tools, and evaluate journals and publishing options.


Richard Wyatt, Jr.: A Blessed Life of Art and Music

In February 2023, Dr. Bridget Cooks and I had the pleasure of interviewing the Los Angeles-based visual artist and songwriter Richard Wyatt, Jr., for the Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative. Wyatt was a joy to interview, making us laugh constantly and sharing what he called Forrest Gump moments, where he was in the right place at the right time to meet and collaborate with celebrities of all stripes. 

A little over a year after this delightful interview, Bridget and I were saddened to hear that Richard had passed away in May 2024. The world has lost a kind and funny man, as well as an talented artist, musician, educator, and thinker. 

While I continue to mourn Richard’s passing, I also want to celebrate his life by highlighting the wonderful stories he shared in his oral history about life, art, music, and seeking new challenges.

Joyce and Richard Wyatt
Joyce and Richard Wyatt, c. 1980s.

Richard Wyatt, Jr., was an artist whose work includes drawings, paintings, installations, and public art. Wyatt was born in Lynwood, California, in 1955, and lived in the Los Angeles area his whole life. He began his art career early, winning the Watts Chalk-In at twelve years old, and then studying at the Watts Towers Art Center, the Chouinard Art Institute, and the Tutor/Art Program with artist Charles White. Wyatt attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BFA in art. Some of his best-known work in Los Angeles includes the mural Hollywood Jazz: 1945-1972 on the Capitol Records Building; the mural City of Dreams, River of History in Union Station; and the installation Ripple of Hope at Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park. Wyatt taught drawing and painting at the University of California, Irvine; the Otis Art Institute; and the Watts Towers Art Center. He also had a career as a songwriter, writing songs for musicians like The Miracles, The Sylvers, and New Edition. 

One thing that continues to strike me about Richard is the indelible mark he has left on the world—and I mean that literally. Some of Richard’s best-known work was his public art, which adorned buildings and other public places in the Los Angeles area and beyond. For this reason, Bridget found interviewing Richard almost surreal. In the oral history, she explained, “…your work is part of my Los Angeles,” for indeed, Richard’s public art shaped the city in which she grew up. After our first day of interviews, Cooks and I drove around Downtown Los Angeles, pointing out and visiting sites where Richard’s work dotted the landscape: Union Station, Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park, the Capitol Records Building, and on and on.

Image of Union Station
“City of Dreams, River of History” mural by Richard Wyatt, Jr., Eastern Lobby of Union Station, 1996. This mural was part of a larger collaboration with artist May Sun and architect Paul Diez.

One of Richard’s most famous murals, Hollywood Jazz: 1945-1972, remains on the Capitol Records Building, although he later replaced the paint on this south-facing exterior wall with ceramic tile to combat the ravages of the sun. When Richard accepted the commission for this work, it was the perfect blend of his love of visual art and his passion for music. In this mural, he memorialized jazz greats, such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, and Nat King Cole. And in one of those Forrest Gump moments, Richard met musician Bonnie Raitt on site at the Capitol Records Building during his original installation. Listen as Richard recounted this moment:

Richard also mused about the role of an artist after unveiling a work of public art, sharing his thoughts on the impact of his public work: “…you can’t control it…Once it’s out there, it’s out there. People are going to interpret it and take pictures.” And while we spoke about the joys of creating art for wide public consumption, Richard also acknowledged some of the challenges inherent in this work. Listen as Richard shared about some of his public art work with collaborator and fellow artist May Sun:

Richard’s talent also extended to music, and resulted in a prolific career as a songwriter for musical artists such as The Miracles, The Sylvers, Peaches & Herb, Tavares, Johnny Gill, and New Edition. Richard wrote his first song, “Keep on Keepin’ On (Doin’ What You Do)” for The Miracles when he was just eighteen years old. But for Richard, visual art and music were always intertwined, as he experienced synesthesia, a sensory condition in which, among other things, allows some people see colors when they hear music. Richard explained his synesthesia this way:

“I didn’t even know that term until somebody else told me…When I’m writing, that’s one thing. But once I start arranging it and getting the bass and guitar, and then you get strings and horns, there are certain sounds that have a color associated with them. I can’t explain it, but…I see colors once I hear a certain sound, you know? And when I’m creating the arrangements, or even mixing or whatever, and I’m going for a certain effect, it’s like once you get mixing, to me it’s like glazing in oil. That’s the easiest way I can explain it.”

Richard was a child prodigy who burst into the art world when he was twelve years old, rubbing elbows with more experienced art world talents like Charles White, John Riddle, George Evans, and Bill Pajaud. Yet, Richard carved out a career all his own. And while he left us too soon, Richard’s art lives on. To celebrate this remarkable man and artist, I suggest spending time in Downtown Los Angeles and experiencing the work of Richard Wyatt, Jr., for yourself.

To learn more about Richard Wyatt, Jr.’s, extraordinary life and work, explore his oral history!

About the Oral History Center

The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.

 


Bibliopolítica: A Digital History of the Chicano Studies Library

Bibliopolítica: A Digital History of the Chicano Studies Library

At the intersection of Chicana/o/x Studies, Digital Humanities and Library History, Bibliopolítica: A Digital History of the Chicano Studies Library chronicles the history of one of the first Chicana/o/x collections, the Chicano Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bibliopolítica shares the stories of trailblazing library workers, students and community members who worked to preserve and make Chicana/o/x resources available. Featuring photographs, ephemera, archival documents, and oral histories, Bibliopolítica offers an original digital collection of primary sources and is the first audiovisual history of this special place that helped redefine what libraries could be.

Bibliopolítica takes its name from a book of the same title that Richard Chabrán and librarian colleague Francisco García-Ayvens published in 1984, BiblioPolítica: Chicano Perspectives on Library Service in the United States. In 2024, it remains one of the few titles dedicated to the discussion of Chicana/o/x librarianship. Bibliopolítica: a Digital History of the Chicano Studies Library adds to this important conversation, but it is only the beginning of a much needed longer and more detailed history of the Chicano Studies Library and the contributions of Chicana/o/x library workers.

You can explore the digital exhibit, listen to recorded oral histories, browse digitized archival items, or explore on your own path.

Co-curated by Amanda Belantara – Assistant Curator at New York University Libraries, Lillian Castillo-Speed – former Chicano Studies Library Coordinator, now Head Librarian of the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley, and Richard Chabrán – former Chicano Studies Library Coordinator, Team Leader Latino Digital Archive Group.

Digitization of archival items by Chrissy Huhn and UC Berkeley Library IT and Oral history recordings at Berkeley by Pablo Gonzalez and Angelica Garcia. See additional credits.

 


A&H Data: What even is data in the Arts & Humanities?

This is the first of a multi-part series exploring the idea and use of data in the Arts & Humanities. For more information, check out the UC Berkeley Library’s Data and Digital Scholarship page.

Arts & Humanities researchers work with data constantly. But, what is it?

Part of the trick in talking about “data” in regards to the humanities is that we are already working with it. The books and letters (including the one below) one reads are data, as are the pictures we look at and the videos we watch. In short, arts and humanities researchers are already analyzing data for the essays, articles, and books that they write. Furthermore, the resulting scholarship is data.

For example, the letter below from Bancroft Library’s 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection on Calisphere is data.

blue ink handwriting with sepia toned paper; semi-structuring seen in data, addressee, etc. organization

George Cooper Pardee, “Aid for San Francisco: Letter from the Mayor in Oregon,”
April 24, 1906, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library on Calisphere.

 

One ends up with the question “what isn’t data?”

The broad nature of what “data” is means that instead of asking if something is data, it can be more useful to think about what kind of data one is working with. After all, scholars work with geographic information; metadata (e.g., data about data); publishing statistics; and photographs differently.

Another helpful question is to consider how structured it is. In particular, you should pay attention to whether the data is:

  • unstructured
  • semi-structured
  • structured

The level of structure informs us how to treat the data before we analyze it. If, for example, you have hundreds of of images, you want to work with, it’s likely you’ll have to do significant amount of work before you can analyze your data because most photographs are unstructured.

photograph of adorable ceramic hedgehog

For example, with this picture of a ceramic hedgehog, the adorable animal, the photograph, and the metadata for the photograph are all different kinds of data. Image: Zde, Ceramic Rhyton in the Form of a Hedgehog, 14. to 13. century BCE, Photograph, March 15, 2014, Wikimedia Commons. | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

 

In contrast, the letter toward the top of this post is semi-structured. It is laid out in a typical, physical letter style with information about who, where, when, and what was involved. Each piece of information, in turn, is placed in standardized locations for easy consumption and analysis. Still, to work with the letter and its fellows online, one would likely want to create a structured counterpart.

Finally, structured data is usually highly organized and, when online, often in machine-readable chart form. Here, for example, are two pages from the Polk San Francisco City Directory from 1955-1956 with a screenshot of the machine-readable chart from a CSV (comma separated value) file below it. This data is clearly structured in both forms. One could argue that they must be as the entire point of a directory is for easy of information access and reading. The latter, however, is the one that we can use in different programs on our computers.

Page from San Francisco city directory with columns listing businesses with their addresses.
Page from San Francisco city directory with columns listing businesses with their addresses.
Screenshot of excell sheet with publisher addresses in columns R.L. Polk & Co, Polk’s San Francisco City Directory, vol. 1955–1956 (San Francisco, Calif. : R.L. Polk & Co., 1955),
Internet Archive. | Public Domain.

 

This post has provided a quick look at what data is for the Arts&Humanities.

The next will be looking at what we can do with machine-readable, structured data sets like the publisher’s information. Stay tuned! The post should be up in two weeks.


Library Trial of Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia Digital Archive (1924-1939)

The UC Berkeley Libraries have started a trial of the East View database Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia Digital Archive (1924-1939). The trial can be accessed here.

The access is valid through October 24, 2024. If you are accessing it from an off-campus location, please use the VPN or Proxy. For more information on setting up your off-campus access, see here.

The page of all the issues for 1927 of Ilustrirovannaia Rossiia Journal. This journal was published in Paris, France
The page of all the issues for 1927 of Ilustrirovannaia Rossiia Journal.

About the journal:

Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia was a literary and illustrated weekly magazine published in Paris from 1924 to 1939. The journal was aimed mainly at the growing community of Russian immigrants who had left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. Thus, Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia offers a unique fund of linguistic and visual representations, providing an indispensable insight into Russian cultural life in exile.

The Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia Digital Archive offers this influential journal’s exhaustive and meticulously digitized collection. This archive is an indispensable research resource with 748 issues and over 21,000 pages.
Key features include:
Comprehensive page-level digitization
Faithful reproduction of original graphics
Enhanced search capabilities
Seamless cross-searching with East View’s extensive digital portfolio


Workshop reminder — Copyright & Your Dissertation

Event flyer with green and white background the title 'Copyright and Your Dissertation.'

Date/Time: Tuesday, October 1, 2024, 11:00am–12:00pm
Location: Zoom. RSVP.

This workshop will provide you with practical guidance for navigating copyright questions and other legal considerations for your dissertation or thesis. Whether you’re just starting to write or you’re getting ready to file, you can use our tips and workflow to figure out what you can use, what rights you have as an author, and what it means to share your dissertation online.


Library Trial: Brill’s Cuban Culture and Cultural Relations, 1959-, Part 4: Music

The Library is currently trialing Brill’s Cuban Culture and Cultural Relations, Part IV: Music until October 14, 2024. The database can be accessed here.

This primary source collection documents the history of music in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a special focus on Revolutionary Cuba. It explores the role of music in society and covers festivals, performances, trends, and persons (musicians, composers, producers, etc.). The collection is scanned from the so-called “vertical archive” at Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba (source: Brill)

Title: Abelardo Barroso. 1968Localidad: Cuba Resumen: Entrevista al sonero cubano. Publicada en Bohemia. Coleccion: Colección Archivo Vertical type: Personalidades Estado conservation: Bueno Cant. Doc.: 1 documento
Title: Abelardo Barroso. 1968
Localidad: Cuba
Resumen: Entrevista al sonero cubano. Publicada en Bohemia.
Coleccion: Colección Archivo Vertical

 

Así canta y dice Puerto Rico. 1982Title: Así canta y dice Puerto Rico. 1982 Localidad: Cuba Resumen: Artículos sobre el citado evento, celebrado en Casa de las Américas. Artistas participantes. Publicado en Granma y Trabajadores. Coleccion: Colección Archivo Vertical type: Congreso
Así canta y dice Puerto Rico. 1982

Please use ez proxy or VPN if you are accessing the resource from an off-campus location. Please provide your feedback to your Librarian of the Caribbean and Latin American Studies at Lpendse (at) berkeley (dot) edu

Please access the resource here.