Civil war letters, Ellis Island diaries, your great-great-grandma’s recipes – these types of historical documents are often overlooked or not prioritized for preservation compared to rarer or more ancient works.
Assistant Professor Helen Davies, Ph.D., and Larry Eames, Digital Curation & Scholarship Librarian, are looking to change that with an Advanced Institute in the Digital Humanities next summer, hosted at UCCS.
The institute aims to expand access to sophisticated multispectral imaging (MSI) devices – a form of digital photography that captures images across a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum wider than the visible – by making them more affordable and easier to use for universities and scholars. The technology is a nondestructive way of “recovering text and images from cultural heritage objects that have been faded, stained, charred, used as palimpsests, stained, or otherwise rendered obscure or illegible, and allows the selective combination of images to be taken at various wavelengths of light.”
With the help of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant (NEH), Davies and Eames, who are also Co-Directors of the Center for Research Frontiers in the Digital Humanities, will introduce smaller, more affordable multispectral imaging technology to visiting participants at the institute.
“I have been working to make the multispectral imaging technology for cultural heritage to be more accessible, easier to use, and much more affordable,” Davies explained. “The original, advanced systems cost about $100,000, and I ended up getting an experimental system that cost about $10,000. It occurred to me in this process that while $10,000 is potentially affordable for a university or institution with some grant writing and whatnot, it’s still not in the realm of affordability for people on a personal level or for many institutions. So I’ve been working to make the technology simpler and easier to use, and finding lower cost alternatives that can, if not produce exactly the same results, approximate some of the data that you can get.”
The $250,000 grant allows for fifteen participants of faculty, grad students and archival professionals from all over the nation to come to campus to work with the material and technology here. It also includes money to provide every single participant with one of the small systems and for all of the teaching faculty and participants to travel to an archive to continue to develop their own project.
Co-hosting the institute with Davies and Eames are Davies’ collaborators from Videntes, a multispectral imaging initiative of which Davies is a co-founder. They ran a similar institute with her in Vercelli, Italy last year that focused more on the historical manuscripts of the region, while this upcoming one will concentrate on teaching participants to use the technology and software.
“The institute is the teaching section, sort of laying the groundwork for the tech,” said Davies. “We’ll have people coming in who are specialists in technology and in different types of material culture. The technology was developed for medieval and ancient manuscripts, but there’s so many other kinds of cultural heritage that is frequently overlooked in this discussion.”
“We’ll have our own WEST professor, Ilaheva Tua’one, who focuses on Indigenous cultures and texts, and a specialist who works on post-colonial texts from around the world, both working with us, as well as Mary Rupp, the UCCS archivist, who is bringing in a variety of different objects,” Davies added. “And Colorado College has been very generous and has said that we can borrow some of their special collections so that our participants can get hands-on experiences with a variety of different cultural heritage objects as well.”
This more accessible version significantly opens up the possibilities for studying and preserving of texts and materials. With current technology being more advanced and expensive, it’s generally reserved for ancient texts or rarer materials, which leaves an abundance of documents and works unstudied. For example, the most advanced MSI equipment may be reserved for a medieval text, while the tech Davies is working on can be used for more recent or less “prestigious” items, such as a letter from Civil War era or a diary from an Ellis Island immigrant – works that are still valuable pieces of history and show ways of life but are not highest priority.
“The MSI has traditionally been mostly classical materials or medieval materials, but that overlooks a lot of cultural heritage around this world,” said Davies. “I’m hoping that by training folks how to use this camera system but letting them follow their own specialty, and by working to create software that is as easy to use as possible, then they can go into archives that may have been overlooked, underserved, or have been left out of the conversation around this technology in the past, to try to recover some of this cultural heritage that is in danger of being erased or forgotten.”
“Another thing is that when you subject documents to this sort of prestigious treatment, then it moves it into this kind of archival, either physically or mentally, that other historians, linguists and literature folks start to take it more seriously and to treat it as an object worth study,” Davies continued. “And so I’m hoping to expand the archive not just physically but also metaphorically – expanding what types of documents are considered ‘worthy’ of this treatment.”
Along with this potential to significantly increase the amount and type of texts to be studied, the more affordable tech could also be instrumental in preserving materials digitally in the event they are physically damaged or destroyed.
“The final piece of this that I’ve started to have conversations around, especially with Mary Rupp in the university archives, is damage to cultural heritage sites, like those affected by the fires in Hawaii,” shared Davies. “So as we’re training more people on this technology, we’re also hopefully finding new ways to expand this technology into places that are hit by fire and other forms of increasing weather damage and recover that information.”
Davies also emphasized the potential, and her excitement, for this expanded MSI tech to highlight the daily lives and habits of more recent generations, allowing a glimpse into the more mundane but very real experiences they had.
“The everyday experiences of people in any time and place, that’s the sort of thing I’m hoping that this can focus on rather than grand narratives or prestigious objects,” said Davies. “History or literature is written by the people who ‘won,’ whether that’s fame, prestige, or just that they had more money. This will hopefully allow us to see the other side, the people whose voices were quenched because of whatever social, cultural, or war-related norm was going on at the time.”
“The Civil War letters that I had found in a bathroom – there were a lot of letters from a soldier fighting from Ohio who had gone south to fight in the Civil War, probably to support the union,” she continued. “But the content was mostly like, ‘How’s my cow doing? I miss my sister.’ These letters share this personal experience rather than these grand narratives that were taught. But that type of personal experience of, ‘I miss my sibling’ is much more relatable, and in many ways much more interesting, because you see what people are actually prioritizing.”