>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Next is Stephanie
Stillo who is the curator
of the Lessing J. Rosenwald
Collection in the Rare Book
and Special Collections Division
of the Library of Congress.
Prior to joining the
Library of Congress,
she served as the Mellon professor
of History and Digital Humanities
at Washington and Lee University
where she taught classes
on digital exhibition and
design, public history,
and digital story telling.
She's going to highlight some
work at the Library of Congress
that relates to collections as data
in her talk, Only Once Imagined.
Stephanie.
>> Stephanie Stillo:
Thank you very much.
And thank you for NDI for
inviting me to speak today.
I've been working with them
on a digital scholarship working
group recently and I've really come
to respect the depth of knowledge
and commitment that they have
to sharing the Library's collections
which I think is certainly
something that we see here today.
And a special thank you also to
Sarah for that lovely presentation.
We were just commenting
about how we were tearing
up a little bit in the back.
So the title of my talk I feel
like requires some explaining.
Also I realize that it might be a
little bit risky to begin a talk
with poem that is called The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
But nonetheless here we go.
So I am the Rosenwald curator
here at the Library of Congress.
And I have the great
privilege of overseeing one
of the largest Blake collections,
William Blake collections
in the world.
And I never get tired
of saying that out loud.
That's always a really fun statement
to say at any point really.
So Blake -- I think
about Blake a lot.
And Blake wrote this
particular work immediately
after the French revolution.
And the poem is very much this
homage to the concept of change,
to change in conventional morality,
to change in politics,
to change in religion.
And it is a quite inspiring quote.
So as a rare books curator,
I think about Blake a lot.
And I think about this
idea, Blake's idea,
of the once imagined quite a bit.
And I usually think
about it in the context
of the way printing changed
European society after 1455.
And I like to think
about what Europeans saw
or what they were thinking when
they saw the first image of the moon
through a telescope; right?
Or the first microscopic image
of a feather or a blade of grass.
And I think about how these
visualizations empowered public
knowledge and really upended
traditional intellectual thought.
So I think about history a lot
working in a rare books division.
But what I find very inspiring
about this moment in history,
about our moment in
history, is that the way
that the digital tools are
allowing us to live in this age
where the once imagined
is true again.
And through new data sets,
through new methods of analysis,
through new visualizations,
we're able to ask questions
that simply weren't possible before.
And in a way we're standing, I
think, at this similar moment
of change which is quite exciting.
So today I've been asked
to talk about my experience
at the Library of Congress.
Now, I have to begin with
somewhat of a confession.
And my confession is that I work
at the largest library in the world
and I'm not a librarian, and this is
a reoccurring confession in my life.
I've taught digital humanities
and I'm not a technologist.
I -- a lot of my research
right now focuses on the impact
of preservation technology
on historical research
and I'm in no way a scientist.
But what I am is a historian
that has wandered into one
of the greatest repositories of
human experience ever amassed here
at the Library of Congress.
At over 160 million items
here at the Library,
we are a galaxy of stories.
And so today I want to talk about
my methods of using these resources.
But I think what's far more
exciting is that my voice, I think,
is part of this much larger choir
of research that's really changing
the way that we're thinking
about our collections at
the Library of Congress.
So the first time I stepped into
the Library was not as the curator
of the Rosenwald collection.
It was back in 2012 and
I was a Mellon fellow.
And at that time I had
this very simple goal.
I wanted to tell a
story about books.
I was interested in how books
moved through time in space.
I was interested in the
people who owned them
and the way they used them and
changed them for their own use.
Books have certainly a
sort of life of their own
and the early modern world
particularly in the western world,
people would annotate and color
and draw in their books to be able
to understand the information
better.
And I was terribly interested
in this idea of attempts
to organize knowledge, to -- to use
books in this very personal way,
to classify the world around you,
to make information personal.
But one of the challenges
of working with old books is
that they often bear the scars
of moving through time and space.
Annotations fade; pigments corrode;
books are rebound and resold.
Many of them lived through
revolutions and political
and religious censorship.
They've crossed continents
several times over.
And this all adds to
the story of your book.
But it also adds another layer
of research that's very difficult
to access as just a
historian; right?
So I wanted to follow
a book when I got here.
But I needed a team
of detectives; right?
I couldn't do it alone.
I needed someone to help me.
And that's exactly what I found
in the preservation research
and testing division here
at the Library of Congress.
For those of you that are
-- that do not work here,
one of the most extraordinary
resources that we have
at the library are
these subterranean labs
in the Madison building
that are just filled
with this fabulous technology.
Much of it that I do not
understand and teams of scientists
that are dedicated to looking at our
collections as objects and digging
in beyond just what we
see under the surface.
So when I arrived at the Library,
I met people that specialized
in technology that I had
never even heard of before.
Again, I'm a historian.
So things like multispectral
imaging and x-ray florescence
and microscopy don't exactly
factor into my vocabulary.
These -- but these were the
kinds of technologies --
these forensic technologies
were exactly what I needed
to get the results that I
wanted from this project.
And there was nowhere else that I
was going to find this combination
of resources and expertise but
at the Library of Congress.
So ultimately I had to learn, right?
So eventually I settled
on this fabulous book,
a World Atlas in the
rare books division.
The printing was lovely
but the coloring
in the book was very, was sloppy.
There were annotations.
It was born in one place
and ended up in another.
It was problematic and I've
really come to appreciate
as a rare books curator
problematic books.
They tell great stories; right?
The books that look like crap
are the ones you always --
bring them on.
They're quite fantastic.
So -- and so I settled on this book
and, you know, like most research,
it ended up -- the
conclusions of the project ended
up being much more than I expected.
And I don't want to burden this
with too many specifics
but just very briefly.
So the original print placed
the beginning of my story in --
with a son of a knife maker
in 17th century Amsterdam
in a print shop called
The Three Crabs
which I think is a great
name for a print shop.
Analysis of the annotations
revealed that my book moved to Italy
with a student of military
geography in the 18th century.
And he -- he likely bound the work
and had significant annotations
so it was sort of revealing, this
interesting sort of organization
of his geographic knowledge.
The pigment analysis introduced me
to a 19th century owner that touched
up the colors, likely to vetch
a better price on the
antiquarian book market
when he tried to sell the book.
And eventually found its way
actually to the collections of one
of the Library's greatest
benefactors.
And only into the Library
collection in 1980, right?
So this was, again, there
was a lot that, in the end --
of course, I had more
questions about my book; right?
But this was a great story.
And one that I've been
able to talk about in terms
of this journey quite often
which has really been lovely
and all emerges out of this early
research at the Library of Congress.
So now I have the great
honor of being the curator
of the Rosenwald collection
which is one of the greatest,
graphic arts collections
in the world.
And since I've become the
curator I've continued to work
with our preservation
division to think
about unlocking new stories; right?
Opening new doors for research.
And I'm very lucky that
we're able to do this.
So just to give you
a couple examples.
Through multispectral imaging
and principal component
analysis we were able
to identify Saint Catherine
of Alexandria
in this 15th century paste print.
It's quite rare.
There's not many of
these that survived
but we're able to recover
this image.
Rightfully so because Saint
Catherine is the patroness
of librarians.
So we had to make sure, you
know, that we got her back.
So -- so we should all
expect good fortune.
We have in the -- in the Rosenwald
collection we have canceled plates
from William Blake's
America so the first
of his continental
prophecies; right?
And this plate has personal
annotations, pencil annotations
from William Blake
and they're fading.
So through, again,
multispectral imaging
and principal component
analysis, we're able to pull
out these annotations
which are essential
for the historical
record for William Blake.
Again, here's some more images.
But one of the projects
that I'm most proud
of which is a new partnership
between the rare books division
and the preservation
division is a particular type
of what you might call down market
printing in the 15th century.
These are called block
books, block book printing.
They -- due to their
sort of low status
and ephemerality they don't
really last past the 15th century.
The technique doesn't last
really past the 15th century.
They're somewhat lost in
conversations about --
about print in this really
important 15th century moment.
And it's unfortunate because
these are really the prints
that helped guide European
devotion for nearly a century.
So these new technical studies
are really helping us think
about new sites of production
for these particular works
through analysis of pigments,
through analysis of ink,
through analysis of paper; right?
And we're able to get at these --
these sort of wonderful resources
in this new and fascinating way.
So even with all of these
new projects and even
with now being the
Rosenwald curator,
I still think about
my one book, right?
And I think about where it all began
and why I was able
to tell that story.
And I think about that one
story within the context
of our 160 million
items at the library.
And each one of them
having their own story.
And a lot of our collections
have been touched
by names that we know; right?
Names that we remember.
Names like George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, Rosa Parks,
Hannah Arendt, one of my
personal favorites, Carl Sagan.
But I think what's most exciting
and what's happening at the Library
of Congress right now is that we're
starting to discover, I think,
the people that we rarely
hear from in our collection
and we're just starting to
hear from in our collections.
And new stories that are coming or
that are emerging from the Library
from new partnerships and new
research in our collections.
So for example, the Chronicling
the America API which is something,
I think, that has already been
brought up but is helping us learn
about American agriculture.
Thinking about this sort
of what the organizers
of this project call this long human
history, right, of agriculture.
And the way that Americans were
swept into innovation and technology
and science that has come
to really define modernity.
I've actually personally
forwarded this to the historian
at the Department of Agriculture and
he's just delighted by this project.
So it was very, like,
satisfying to me.
It was -- to be able to
share this with someone.
The availability of newspapers
and again the Chronicling
America API is facilitating new
conversations about
American lynching.
Paying necessary and close attention
to the victims of violent mobs.
And exploring how newspapers
played this dual role, right,
between violence and reform
and thinking about that.
We are just starting to
learn about what we will --
what will be revealed
from the release
of our 25 million mark records.
Benjamin Schmitt at Northeastern
University is using the data
to create a visual history of
marked cataloging at the Library.
If you haven't seen this,
I encourage you to go look.
It is quite fantastic.
And has certainly the
potential for insights
into our own institutional history.
I've been at many meetings now
where this has been brought up
and I can assure you that
every one at the Library
of Congress has an
opinion about this project
which is nice to see; right?
But it -- this is what these
projects do is they facilitate these
sort of fabulous conversations.
And it's nice to see it here
certainly at the Library.
So just to wrap up.
Again, I like to think about
my experience at the Library
and my collection that I carried.
Again, one collection within
a galaxy of collections.
And I like to think of it
as this very small part
of an emerging mosaic of
research here at the Library
where we continue to
find those stories
that are hidden in our collections.
And whether that be an American
farmer or our own catalogers
or the son of a knife
maker in Amsterdam,
right, in the 16th century.
And as we continue, I think, to
explore our data which again we're
at this really exciting moment
where we're having a renaissance
with our data that we're
starting to think together
about the digital tools that might
help us find these new stories.
And we can only do
that together; right?
But what's so unique, I think,
about this moment is going back
to Blake's quote about "the
once only imagined," right?
That we stand at that
moment of change right now.
And that as we keep working together
and as we keep discovering
these collections
and as we keep making
them more available,
I feel like we come
closer to truly saying
that what we imagine today we very
well may be able to prove tomorrow.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
