Tyler Candelora – Digital Scholarship Summer Research Fellows 2017

Author: Tyler Candelora (page 1 of 2)

Summer Research Reflection

In the beginning of the summer, I thought I had the perfect envision for my research project. I had a solid research question, “How do Pennsylvania anthracite mining communities publicly represent their heritage?,” and a plethora of ideas to pursue. As the summer progressed, I realized that my scope was incredibly ambitious to complete in eight weeks. Instead of developing a two month research plan, I had created a much longer in-depth goal.

After some weeks, I had to find different ways to tighten my scope and realize a definite project by the end of July. As an undergraduate, having completed a successful research project is an invaluable experience. In two short months, I was able to expand on prior research that I partook in and expand my knowledge of a particular area of study. I really enjoyed finding a new niche and field — the intersection of landscape architecture and memory studies. Through extensive readings and applying certain theories, I have developed a new perspective to view the world and, particularly, my relationship with my hometown.

Additionally, I was able to learn more about the field of digital humanities and collaborate with my peers about how to integrate digital scholarship into our own classes. A great component about Digital Scholarship is that it encourages collaboration. It was an absolute pleasure to work in a student cohort with Justin, Minglu, and Rennie. Although we conducted independent research, throughout the summer we gave each other constructive feedback. Also, Courtney and Carrie were essential with keeping us on track and helping us work through the various digital platforms. It was great being introduced to many of the library and IT staff. I am so pleased to know so many wonderful people now.

My final research project is a digital database curating ten monuments and analyzing their symbology and significance to the anthracite region. Also, by critiquing their urban spaces this illuminated how Shamokin has the potential to represent their coal mining heritage. The digital database is not an exhaustive list of monuments in the anthracite coal region of PA; however, it is a genesis of a much larger digital archive intended to establish a connection with a town’s history and heritage through public monuments.

I created a “walking-tour” of the monuments by using a few different interactive platforms for the reader. There is a timeline, map, and digital gallery of the monuments. This allows the reader to view the monuments historically, geographically, and as a curation. There are newspapers for some monuments so that the reader can read about the importance of the monument through a public medium. There are also some photos analyzed for their symbology of the PA anthracite coal region, and I try to propose how Shamokin could represent their heritage as well. I encourage the reader to visit these monuments as well to experience their distinct urban spaces.

Please visit my site and feel free to contact me with any suggestions or information you may have!

-Tyler Candelora ’19 tdc008@bucknell.edu

http://tinyurl.com/PACoalMiners

Research Issues

July 5, 2017 / Tyler Candelora / Comments Off

During the summer of 2016, I started my first research project, and I was using digital humanities tools. There was so much I had learned from that experience from archiving data to using Omeka and Neatline. There was not a steep learning curve in terms of the platforms I was using. Instead, the most difficult part of the research was learning how to conduct “research,” especially in the (digital) humanities field. I thought that I would be able to anticipate some of these challenges again, but I still had some trouble along the way.

The most important experience I gained was that research can change while one is investigating different materials and resources. For me, I always view a big picture when I begin my research project. I can picture methodologies, the end goal, life after the project, ways to incorporate it for a bigger audience, etc. However, this can become a real issue when I only have eight weeks to produce meaningful conclusions. Thus, thinking I learned from the previous summer, I fell into this trap again.

I had to re-scope my project each week in order to make further advances. Thus, the number of newspapers and monuments I wanted to archive dwindled, and the number of platforms I had wanted to use. Now I know that less is truly more. When you have less material, I thought it meant that my project was becoming less-meaningful and that if I had eight weeks I could have produced more if I would have worked harder. But, since I made my scope smaller, I realized that I can dive into more specific and interesting texts to uncover materials that were not previously sought after.

This brings me to my next problem within conducting research. I have a constant need to examine whether or not my research is actually contributing something to this world. Being a humanities major on Bucknell’s campus along with a plethora of natural science and engineering majors can be a hassle. Sometimes when I talk to science majors about the research I do, it is looked down upon as unimportant. Later after thinking about my contributions through my research, I realized that this is quite the contrary. A science major’s and a humanities major’s research both contribute to meaningful research to their areas of studies if they choose to put the time and effort into their work. Also, I have a different audience than a science major and different plans for the afterlife of my work. It will and it should take different forms.

Another problem is that it is difficult to conduct research alone while being efficient. There are distractions in life and certainly during the summer. I found that working in a group setting and getting automatic feedback proved to really push me along. Sometimes when working alone, I did not realize how slow I was reading or archiving materials.

Overall, I hope that in my next future research project, I can become much better at creating a scope that fits well within my timeframe. I really enjoy discovering new materials that I never knew existed within my studies and I feel very lucky to be learning through my own archiving. I really enjoyed learning all of the digital platforms, and I hope I can use them in further projects in class or conducting research. There is so much more to learn about research and many avenues that humanities research can take that I know I want to do more projects after this one. But until then, these last three weeks will be hectic, pulling all the information together and creating different visualizations!

Methodology and Digital Tools

June 28, 2017 / Tyler Candelora / Comments Off

My Digital ToolChest:

Voyant

Antconc

TimeMapper

Alchemy API

Scalar

As the end of the digital scholarship program comes swiftly along, I have revised and critiqued my own research question multiple times. I believe this is the most challenging aspect of research for me. I always have a larger vision for my project because I see it encompassing a variety of geographic regions and a multitude of digital tools for analysis. After much discussion and deliberation, I am now on the right track to finish my research project: The Representation of Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Miners: An Artistic Movement. (This title is a work in progress as well!)

I recently began archiving information on various monuments throughout the central PA anthracite region, finding a variety of coal miner statues in all three prominent coal fields: northern, middle, and southern. After I find ten monuments, I will choose five that are the most intricate and thought-provoking monuments, and pinpoint that certain location. I will then collect newspaper articles from these regions, searching the word “coal miner”. My date range will be after the fall of the coal industry between 1970 to present day. I hope to gather at least 20 articles per area. (or more if possible)

I will OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the newspapers, gathering all the text throughout the five areas. Then, I will use Voyant and Antconc looking at how miners are represented within these texts. I will look for romanticizations of the miners too.

Then, I will use Alchemy API to perform sentiment analysis on the newspapers. I want to see if the computer generates that these are mostly positive or negative representations.

I will then compare these with sentiment and text analysis of 20 newspapers from Shamokin, PA. Thus, I will see if there are any difference in towns that publicly represent coal miners against a town that does not choose to represent coal miners through monuments.

Also, I will critique the monuments with theories about public memory and the geographical location of the monument.

The end result of my findings will be displayed on a scalar site that will include a map of Pennsylvania, which displays the locations of each monument. Additionally, I will have a timeline that shows the monuments. There will be a page for each monument with its metadata and a critique of it too.

Finally, there will be a page on the text/sentiment analysis and a bibliography.

There is much to be done in four weeks, but I believe I am on the right track and moving full speed ahead!

Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region

June 28, 2017 / Tyler Candelora / Comments Off

Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region

There are a plethora of occupations that are dependent upon the formation of the land in a certain location. The development and design of a landscape has a lasting impact on the means of production and labor that create an effective economy. In central Pennsylvania, the anthracite coal mining region began in roughly 1792 with the founding of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company by Josiah White and Erskine Hazard. This was the first commercially operated coal mine. The anthracite region would see new mines developing throughout prominently six counties: Luzerne, Lackawanna, Carbon, Northumberland, Columbia, and Schuylkill. Thus geographically, there are northern, middle, and southern anthracite fields.

As anthracite mining began spreading rapidly throughout central Pennsylvania, many problems arose surrounding working conditions, town life, pay, etc. It was common for miners to have major and minor accidents within and outside of the mines. There were many perilous activities a miner had to perform.

The coal companies began hiring boys to work in the mines as early as ages six to eight. They would pick rock, slate, and refuse out of the coal in the breaker; an arduous and dangerous task for a young boy.[1] There were usually contract miners, laborers, foremen, and superintendents that worked per colliery. There was a large inequality of wages between laborers and miners that caused a further divide between ethnic enclaves. The Welsh immigrants who were skilled miners who usually became the foremen and superintendents of a colliery. While Irish immigrants were “distrusted” by the coal owners and other miners. This was partly because of the Molly Maguire movement, who were accused of murder, arson, and other crimes throughout the mining districts.

Nevertheless, the dangers and the perils of a coal miner were extreme. The mines could be very difficult to mine in without proper lightning, protection, ventilation, or other essential equipment. Usually due to poor ventilation, mine fires would trap miners in the coal mines and the only means of escape was the main shaft, which at times would be destroyed by flames.[2] Other mining accidents included accidents due to poor quality of the colliery with columns falling on people, and commonly floods, which would occur when a geological depression in the mine filled with water and created a flood in the mine.[3] If a miner did not die from an accident in the coal mine, it was common to die from “miner’s lung” or “black lung” from the sulfur toxins in the mines. In order to provide for their families and contribute to the economic prosperity of their town, miners would sacrifice their well-being and risk death.[4]

In order to preserve the heritage and culture of the coal mining industry, while paying homage to the coal miners and their families, some anthracite communities choose to represent coal miners through monuments. These representations are sometimes specific to a certain town’s coal history, however, many represent the greater Pennsylvania anthracite region.

By critiquing the two out-facing public mediums, newspapers and monuments, I will investigate how Pennsylvania anthracite coal communities choose to represent their coal heritage.

[1] Janet MacGaffey, Coal Dust on Your Feet: The Rise, Decline, and Restoration of an Anthracite Mining Town (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 23.

[2] Ibid., 25.

[3] Ibid., 25.

[4] The few descriptions of different types of accidents in the coal mines is not an exhaustive list. There were many other perils and dangers depending on the skill level of a miner or laborer and the quality of the colliery and its owners.

My Refined Project Idea

June 12, 2017 / Tyler Candelora / Comments Off

Project Name
- The Representation of Anthracite Coal Miners: An Artistic Movement
Project Summary
- - “Through analyzing different forms of artistic mediums, I will identify the ways in which coal miners have been represented and the impact of their lives on the anthracite region.”
  - Areas: Northumberland, Luzerne, Schuylkill, Lackawanna, Columbia, and Carbon
    - In 8 weeks, I want to create a multimedia platform that includes artwork, poems/brief stories, songs, monuments, photography, and possibly film representing coal miners. I would also like to get audio clips from citizens from each area in the coal region.
    - I want to use my ideas of social memory and spatial memory while outlining the importance of where the monuments are situated.
    - I think Scalar would be the best platform to display all of my media. I would include forms of text analysis on the poems, brief stories, and songs. I would also like to do some sentiment visualizations with the songs. I want to create some data visualizations as well.
    - My audience will be the people of the anthracite region. I want to show a collection of the representation of coal miners to the people who chose to remember the coal miners, or those who maybe did not choose to remember (Shamokin).
Environmental Scan
- My project mapping monuments, “Shamokin and Coal Township: An Interactive Map” is the only useful website I could find.
- There are really no other similar projects, except some authors discuss the representation or do a “study” of the “Appalachian” region.
- This project will focus on anthracite coal miners, and include an abundance of different artistic representations.

Requirements for Development
- Copyright Concerns: song lyrics, poems/stories, photography
- I can go to the different historical societies of each region and online databases to find some of the materials.
- I will need resources on the ideas of social memory. I would also like some books on art aesthetic theory.
- The coal miners union
- PA state records: WPA
Bulleted List of Deliverables
- Find at least three examples of each artistic element: artwork, monuments, photography, poems/stories, and songs for each of the six counties
- Gather audio clips from at least two people from each of the six counties
- Analyze the representations, using Marx, social memory, spatial memory theories
- Create a scalar website
  - - Include the media components
    - Use text analysis tools on the songs and poems/stories
    - Use sentiment analysis tools on the song lyrics
    - Use theories to discuss artwork, monuments, and photography
  - Critique bad or feteshized representations of coal miners
  - Include a brief history of anthracite coal miners
End of Life/Future Plans
- This project could easily be added upon. One could continue finding different artistic representations in the anthracite region, or begin researching other coal regions of PA or other states. Then, it could be connected with different coal regions from around the world.
- Also, the monuments could be mapped, like my first research project, and one could research each town individually.

As I begin looking over my bulleted list of deliverables and thinking about how I could refine my project, I believe my scope will instead be my media. I will use only three different mediums – written & visual art and newspapers. My area will be the anthracite region broadly conceived and I think I will use the timelines of 1900-1930 and 1970 to present to look at how miners were represented during the height of the coal mining industry and after the fall of the industry. I believe this will not limit my research and not overwhelm me either, since I will be finding information through newspapers and artifacts that interest me in terms of written and visual art.

Digital Scholarship Summer Research Fellows 2017