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Bass Connections Project Teams: Visualizing VeniceNC JukeboxDigital Durham: Past, Present, FutureBuilding Duke: The Architectural History of Duke Campus from 1924 to the PresentWorld Building at Duke in an Emerging Durham: 1924-1932 

Victoria Szabo has been leading Bass Connections teams since the program began in 2013, and was the co-leader of the Information, Society and Culture theme from 2016-2022. Her Bass Connections projects explore how critical engagement with new media and information technologies can transform understandings of history, art and culture. Recent project teams pay special attention to location-based augmented reality, driven by archival research.

Academics often talk about how people in the humanities often work alone, and that collaborative projects aren’t as emphasized as a way to do scholarship. Plenty of arts and humanities scholars do collaborative projects through their teaching, but their research products may not be collaboratively produced in the same way as they are in the sciences.

Bass Connections provides a space for a different approach – projects must be collaborative and cross-disciplinary, include external partners where possible and ideally include team-produced outputs at the end of the year, with checkpoints and milestones to move projects forward.

As the co-leader of the Information, Society and Culture theme from 2016 to 2022, I always strove to include arts and humanities projects within the thematic structure – expanding the reach of data science to encompass archival projects and “texts” that don't fit easily into data models. My own Bass Connections projects also often explore how technology can be used to engage with the humanities, while also examining the impacts of technology on culture and society and the assumptions that may underlie its use.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration and the Humanities

As Bass Connections project leaders, we tend to attract students from different disciplines who want to be engaged in an interesting problem to work on, bringing in skills from their respective fields to do something new or exciting for them. For example, computer science or engineering students, who may be more used to being part of collaborative inquiry, have the opportunity to work together on something new for them like an exhibit or website design. On the other hand, arts and humanities students may have the opportunity to actualize their ideas with the support of team members who have more experience in other fields.

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Team members of the World Building at Duke in an Emerging Durham: 1924-1932 team working together
Team members of the World Building at Duke in an Emerging Durham: 1924-1932 team working together

This cross-interdisciplinary approach is timely for universities. It is important now more than ever for the arts and humanities to learn how to be in dialogue with fields like the sciences and resist the idea that the disciplines need to be in conflict or competitive with each other. We all have something of value to bring to the table, and I strive to bring the questions typically asked by humanists into conversation with the kinds of questions being asked in tech.

It is important now more than ever for the arts and humanities to learn how to be in dialogue with fields like the sciences and resist the idea that the disciplines need to be in conflict or competitive with each other.

For example, in my current project team, World Building at Duke in an Emerging Durham: 1924-1932, my co-leader Edward Triplett brought his drone to Bennett Place, a historic monument in Durham that we are examining to consider how places of memory operate within the city and within our culture at large. We used the drone to explore Bennett Place from a new perspective.

On one hand, our students were geeking out about the drone and capture technology. But then we had the opportunity to ask some deeper questions about how to use this technology faithfully, such as: What do we now know with these new perspectives, and what can’t we know? How do we think about the drone ‘eye’ in the larger culture? Do we have concerns about that? Are there ways in which it gives us a false sense of knowledge? Engaging in this way provides an avenue to introduce those questions in a context that does not dismiss the use of technology but invites deeper examination of it.

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Team members of the World Building team work together using maps of Durham, NC
Team members of the World Building at Duke in an Emerging Durham: 1924-1932 team work together using maps of Durham, NC.

In projects like this one, I try to find the balance between being a tech enthusiast and a cultural critic. We cannot close our eyes to the fact that technologies are everywhere. We can choose to try to minimize them, or we can engage them – which doesn’t mean that we can’t still choose to reject some of them. But I think one of the roles of the arts and humanities is to help us think about how to engage, ask questions and analyze technologies in a productive way. That's what I've tried to bring to all of my projects.

Open-Ended Exploration

Another benefit of the Bass Connections model is prioritizing open-ended exploration. One exercise my team did recently was to examine some photos from the early to mid-20th century, investigating them to determine the date and the context of the photo. At first it seems impossible, but then they might notice a corner of an advertisement that leads to students looking at a newspaper, then at the city directory, and so on.

There's truly a treasure-hunting component of working in archives, where it's not all pre-digested, and much of it is not digitized. Students have an opportunity to connect to material artifacts when so much of our world is digital. Students can also realize that artifacts from the past may reveal much more than intended at their creation. We can glean from them all sorts of information to help us understand something about the past and to help us tell a story.

There's truly a treasure-hunting component of working in archives, where it's not all pre-digested, and much of it is not digitized.

Bass Connections gives students an opportunity to explore artifacts and ideas in greater depth than they may normally be able to, in part because of the project-based nature. In that context we can help build the skills to go through an exploratory process with both a critical eye and an open mind.

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Three students from the 2016-2017 NC Jukebox team explore a recording device originally used by Frank Clyde Bown in the early 20th century
Three students from the 2016-2017 NC Jukebox team explore a recording device originally used by Frank Clyde Bown in the early 20th century.

Bass Connections also helps students get more comfortable with the labor and frustration that sometimes accompany the research process. For example, we recently had a student who was examining data from a specific street in Durham to find out more about the community that lived there in the early 20th century. We were using a website that contains census data, but it is intended for finding individual records, not mass export. The student was stuck trying to figure out how to download all the data at once, until I suggested gathering the information record by record, one at a time.

In a landscape where so much information seems to be at our fingertips, this was a small moment that helped this student understand that information itself is produced, and that sometimes, you have to do something a little tedious and effortful to get your result. My hope is that this minor pain point enables them to appreciate the information that is produced, and also to potentially care more about it because they put the time, energy and thought into the process.

What I find to be both rewarding and a measure of success when I am leading a Bass Connections team are those moments when students are in a flow state, toiling away on something from a place of deep, sustained engagement. We get to witness their commitment and enthusiasm to do something together or independently, moving beyond checking boxes for their transcript. These students get in the zone, using the technical skills we help teach them – but for a purpose that may be new and exciting and produce an output different from what they’re used to. I think that can be a really good combination.

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