Hello! Welcome to the process blog for Books as Art, Art as Data, a collaborative project between the Pratt School of Information and the Center for Book Arts.

We are five graduate students (and one faculty advisor) at Pratt’s School of Information.  Our student team members are currently pursuing Masters’ degrees, divided in specialties between Library and Information Science and Data Analytics and Visualization. We are all pursuing an Advanced Certificate in Digital Humanities (DH).   

We are choosing to document our project via a process blog for a number of reasons:

1. We value process as a project output 

As students, our technological proficiencies are in development.  Thus the iterative learning process we are engaging in during this project is one of its most valuable deliverables.  In addition to being valuable for our individual professional development, we hope that the lessons learned through the project process can be useful to other students and scholars who are new to the world of digital humanities. The goal of this project is process and engagement, not perfection.  

2. To highlight work behind this digital humanities project

As digital humanities students, we value the lens of humanistic inquiry that DH as a field brings to technological work.  We hope that documenting the process of the project in accessible language will help the people that engage with our work to better understand the labor that goes on behind the scenes of digital projects.

3. To demystify the ways in which our biases and constraints influence digital work

We want to emphasize the human involvement in digital humanities projects, and highlight the ways in which our decision making process as people, influences the project results.  Our biases and the constraints and challenges our project faces inevitably impact our project output.  By making these factors explicit, we hope that other DH practitioners will be able to better assess how they may or may not be able to replicate our process.

Thank you for engaging with our project- we hope you will enjoy following along with our process!

Written by Maddy Casey
Edited by Claudia Berger