Browsing by Author "Borgo Ton, Mary"

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Class Activities Day 8: Digital Tools for Revision and Reflection
(2019-01) Bowden, Mary; Borgo Ton, Mary; Story, Daniel
These are the teaching notes and slide deck for Day 8. These materials described digital tools for revision and reflection. In preparation for class, Daniel Story downloaded the copy of Lady Audley's Secret that students had been annotating and ran a Python script to generate a spreadsheet of student annotations and their themes. After a discussion of madness at the beginning of class, Mary Borgo Ton led a data cleaning and network analysis activity that asked students to identify passages that overlapped thematically.
The Franken Assignment: Going Beyond the Essay
(2018-10-23) Borgo Ton, Mary
Are you eager to try new forms of assignments but are not sure where to start? Looking for resources to help students build engaging and interactive final projects? In this workshop, we'll explore alternatives to the essay, ranging from digital maps to interactive digital posters to video and multimedia. Like essays, these assignments give students the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of course material, but they go one step further by helping students learn and refine digital skills. As we consider examples, we'll discuss best practices for designing assignment instructions and grading rubrics as well as identify local resources for training, tools, and equipment. Presented by Mary Borgo Ton.
FrankensTEIn: Teaching Archival Material through Mark-Up
(2018-10-30) Borgo Ton, Mary
How do we encourage students to read material closely and carefully? What can mark-up show us about the content and context of archival material? This workshop discusses TEI, an internationally-recognized mark-up language, as a framework for analyzing literature, historical documents, and images. We'll use a paper-based activity to explore the manuscript of Frankenstein with a particular focus on the content and editorial history of Mary Shelley's classic novel. No prior experience with mark-up languages needed! Presented by Mary Borgo Ton.
Introduction to Network Analysis Tools
(2019-01-25) Borgo Ton, Mary; Craig, Kalani L.
Interested in using network analysis in your research or teaching? Come to this hands-on session where we will deal with the basics of cleaning and formatting your data and loading it into the simple network visualization app Google Fusion Tables. We'll conclude by discussing (and demonstrating) how this as well as analog approaches to network analysis can work in the classroom. Participants will need a laptop.
"The Magic Lantern Introduces Us to New Friends": Exploring a Million Pictures Data
(2018-04-13) Borgo Ton, Mary
This project explores trends in the data gathered by A Million Pictures, a European digitization initiative devoted to preserving pre-cinema projectors, slides, and textual records, by combining two digital approaches: topic modeling and mapping. Topic modeling identifies words that occur most frequently together in a large corpus of texts through a form of statistical analysis. Using this method, I studied 2,000 descriptions of magic lantern shows given in between 1874 and 1903. While there were records from Canada, India, and New Zealand in this data set, most of these lantern shows occurred in England. The groupings of words, or “topics”, reflected the prevalence of the Church Army, Band of Hope, and Sunday Schools in Lucerna’s textual record. Mapping these patterns revealed that descriptions of magic lantern shows were relatively uniform across the UK, suggesting that magic lantern shows in urban and rural spaces were represented similarly in periodical literature. Since the topics did not vary by region, I studied how the most prevalent topics differed by host organization and how they changed over time. Descriptions of lantern shows given by evangelistic organizations shared vocabulary with those hosted by Sunday Schools and temperance societies. Individual terms like “friends”, “tea”, “dissolving”, and “interesting” appear in descriptions of lantern shows given by the Church Army, Sunday Schools, and the Band of Hope. Placing these terms in within a topic reveals that these terms appear in different combinations depending on the organization hosting the lantern show. For example, “friend” is statistically more likely to occur alongside “interesting” and “dissolving [view]” in an educational context than in a description of a show given by the Church Army. The fact that evangelistic shows tended to avoid the language of entertainment reflects earlier discourse about the magic lantern on the mission field. Missionaries like John Williams and David Livingstone emphasized the usefulness of the lantern in their published accounts of their lantern shows, yet their journals and diaries often foreground the value of the lantern as an entertainment. The decline in topics related to Sunday Schools over time corresponds with the rise of educational lantern lectures, particularly those given by secular institutions like the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. Yet, the inheritance that these secular shows inherited from their precursors in the Sunday School is preserved in the inclusion of “chinese” in a topic describing Frederic Rowley’s lectures at the RAMM. Although Rowley never presented a lecture on China, descriptions of his shows resemble the geographical lectures given the Church Army and in Sunday Schools with the assistance of a commercially-produced lecture entitled “China and the Chinese”. This study suggests that topic modeling can be used to excavate the performance history of lantern shows by foregrounding latent linguistic similarities in published descriptions of these events.
Magic lantern shows through a macroscopic lens: Topic modelling and mapping as methods for media archaeology
(2019-09) Borgo Ton, Mary
This is a pre-print version of an article that will be published in a special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture. This article explores trends across Lucerna, an online web resource, by combining two digital approaches: topic modeling and geospatial mapping. Topic modeling identifies words that occur most frequently together in a large corpus of texts through a form of statistical analysis. Using this method, I studied 2,000 descriptions of magic lantern shows given in between 1874 and 1903. While there were records from Canada, India, and New Zealand in this data set, most of these lantern shows occurred in England. The groupings of words, or “topics”, reflected the prevalence of the Church Army, Band of Hope, and Sunday Schools in Lucerna’s textual record. Mapping these patterns revealed that descriptions of magic lantern shows were relatively uniform across the UK, suggesting that magic lantern shows in urban and rural spaces were represented similarly in periodical literature. Since the topics did not vary by region, I studied how the most prevalent topics differed by host organization and how they changed over time. Descriptions of lantern shows given by evangelistic organizations shared vocabulary with those hosted by Sunday Schools and temperance societies. Individual terms like “friends”, “tea”, “dissolving”, and “interesting” appear in descriptions of lantern shows given by the Church Army, Sunday Schools, and the Band of Hope. Placing these terms in within a topic reveals that these terms appear in different combinations depending on the organization hosting the lantern show. For example, “friend” is statistically more likely to occur alongside “interesting” and “dissolving [view]” in an educational context than in a description of a show given by the Church Army. The fact that evangelistic shows tended to avoid the language of entertainment reflects earlier discourse about the magic lantern on the mission field. Missionaries like David Livingstone emphasized the usefulness of the lantern in their published accounts of their lantern shows, yet their journals and diaries often foreground the value of the lantern as an entertainment. The decline in topics related to Sunday Schools over time corresponds with the rise of educational lantern lectures, particularly those given by secular institutions like the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. Yet, the inheritance that these secular shows inherited from their precursors in the Sunday School is preserved in the inclusion of “Chinese” in a topic describing Frederic Rowley’s lectures at the RAMM. Although Rowley never presented a lecture on China, descriptions of his shows resemble the geographical lectures given the Church Army and in Sunday Schools with the assistance of Newton and Company’s “China and the Chinese”. This study suggests that topic modeling can be used to excavate the performance history of lantern shows by foregrounding latent linguistic similarities in published descriptions of these events.
Project Management Through Poster Design
(2019-03-29) Borgo Ton, Mary
Giving a poster presentation for a class or a conference? In the throes of a research project and need some clarity? This workshop explores poster design as a tool for organizing your research and presenting the results. We’ll discuss project management techniques that not only lead to dynamic and engaging posters but can also help you write papers, articles, and strong grant applications. We’ll share tips for designing your poster as well as identify easy-to-use design tools and on-campus printing resources. Bring a project or an idea to practice with!
Redesigning the Dissertation for the Web: a Case Study
(Indiana University Digital Collections Services, 2019-02-13) Borgo Ton, Mary
Alternative forms of dissertations and theses are hot topics in higher education, but what is it really like to write one? Join Mary Borgo Ton, a Ph.D. candidate in British Literature, for a behind-the-scenes look at her dissertation which takes the form of a Scalar-powered website. The dissertation explores the global history of Victorian screen culture through virtual reality, 3D models, and interactive maps. As she reflects on the design process, she’ll introduce writing techniques that have helped her pivot to a wide range of forms and identify local resources for training, tools, and equipment.
SHINING LIGHTS: MAGIC LANTERNS AND THE MISSIONARY MOVEMENT, 1839—1868
([Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2019-09) Borgo Ton, Mary; Watt, Steve; Mackay, Ellen
This dissertation excavates the global history of early screen culture by studying the letters, journals, and published narratives of missionaries who used projection equipment to supplement their spoken presentation of Christianity with visual material. As the most detailed eye-witness accounts of magic lantern shows on the fringes of the empire before the advent of photography, these primary sources enable me to reconstruct images that missionaries presented to audiences in the South Pacific and Africa, explore the local context of these events, and discuss the representation of magic lantern shows in textual sources. Far from being a one-way transmission of religious thought, magic lantern shows invited reciprocal performances from their audiences, ranging from lavish displays of wealth to tearful silence to raucous joke-telling. I suggest that these unscripted moments speak to the ways that audiences co-opted lantern shows as a means to negotiate their relationship to Christianity and to the empire. By foregrounding the contributions of audiences in the global south and “native” missionaries to magic lantern shows, I challenge Euro-centric histories of early screen culture. These case studies focus on four luminaries within the Victorian missionary movement: John Williams, David Livingstone, Samuel Crowther and his son Dandeson. Drawing from media studies and anthropology, I argue that magic lantern shows and their subsequent representation in text are best understood as moments of mediation. Textual accounts of lantern shows function as records of a multisensory event and as the material expression of embodied cultural practices. Excavating the layers of representation that have accrued over time results in a mode of analysis that I characterize as an “archaeology of mediation.” This dissertation takes the form of a website, http://scalar.maryborgoton.com/shininglights, in order to reflect on the analog and digital technologies that shape our view of nineteenth-century lantern shows. As a study of the nineteenth-century screen experience, this dissertation explores the potential for digital publishing platforms to offer interactive, virtual encounters with archival material. The pdf contains the website’s introduction, table of contents, and bibliography. The supplemental files remediate the website’s content and its visual design.
Topical places, textual spaces
(2019-11-22) Borgo Ton, Mary
When the Royal Geographical Society in London made plans to purchase a magic lantern in 1890 for lectures, one of their members objected by calling the lantern show a “Sunday School Treat.” This keynote combines text analysis with geospatial mapping to trace the treat’s legacy. Such an approach is made possible by Lucerna, an open access resource that digitally remediates information about when and where lantern shows occurred. I use topic modeling, a form of statistical analysis, to identify literary tropes in eyewitness accounts of lantern shows that took place in Britain between 1874 and 1903. Mapping these topics reveals that the textual landscape created by missionary periodicals did not reflect the geographic distribution of lantern shows. Instead, published accounts offered a relatively uniform view of the lantern as an educational tool, regardless of the audience. This mode of media archaeology ultimately implicates acts of analog remediation in digital visualizations.