Topic Drift Across Morgenthau's Eleven-Year Term with Computational Storytelling¶

• Contributors: Sarah A. Buchanan; 40 Graduate Students in 2024SP course.
• Partner: Kirsten Carter, Supervisory Archivist, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum
• Source Available: https://github.com/cases-umd/WWII-FDR-Morgenthau-Topic-Drift
• License: Creative Commons - Attribute 4.0 Intl. Esri Master Agreement Products and Services; OpenRefine BSD 3-Clause.
• Lesson Plan for Instructors

Introduction¶

Students complete a Data Modeling assignment in Data & Records Management 9492, part of the Archival Studies MLIS emphasis at Missouri’s iSchool. Working in groups of three, students are provided with a data dictionary and dataset from an archival agency, and they engage in manipulation and visualization of the data to show patterns, identify or reconstruct decisions, and construct future uses of the records. Classmates often take and share notes in a Google Doc. A Guest Lecture was generously given by PN member Kirsten Carter, Supervisory Archivist at the FDR Presidential Library & Museum, a month out from the assignment due date. There, Carter detailed their million-pages-plus, pre-CT, digitization history of the Morgenthau Project, which created complementary digital pathways for Morgenthau's three collections: personal papers, diaries, and press conferences. Primarily the lecture contextualized the collections' images of microfilm rolls photographed from the original bound volumes, both created in the late 1940s. Henry Morgenthau Jr. (1891-1967) served in the Cabinets of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations (until 1945) as Treasury Secretary, where he led creation of the War Refugee Board (its microfilm records are also digitized), and had jurisdiction of the Secret Service and Coast Guard, among other contributions appearing in the collections. Secondly we visited the Morgenthau Diary Data Portal – a product of collaborative ML treatments with the above Morgenthau Diaries (Greenberg and Marciano 2020, Randby and Marciano 2020), and the Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees collection (Carter, Gondek, Underwood, Randby, and Marciano 2022).

Building on our Fall 2022 CASES Project (Notebook 6), which took an exploratory and thematic approach, this semester Dr. Buchanan highlighted the primary role of chronology in the present arrangement of the collection. Since Series 2 presents the entire collection chronologically, student groups’ task was to discover and articulate accurate subject classifications for each chronological subset. Then when reassembled, each ‘subseries’ of the collection will construct a pattern of Morgenthau’s top-spoken topics during a given timeperiod, aiding researchers most interested in certain subjects. The 8 March 2024 Teaching American History Seminar "FDR, WWII, and the Holocaust" attended by Dr. Buchanan in Jefferson City addressed issues of responding to evidence of the Holocaust by Allied leaders, especially President Franklin Roosevelt, using a selection of primary and secondary sources. The Best Picture win of “Oppenheimer” at the 10 March 2024 Academy Awards also universalized the importance of archival preservation, processing, and access to presidential records. The student submissions are structured as a Computational Story in CASES – including the objectives, visualizations, and ethical considerations enumerated in each Notebook. The below sections relate to the Data Modeling assignment itself, first in the context of TALENT Network (project website) educator (EN) and practitioner (PN) network collaborations, and more broadly that of graduate archival education and archival science pedagogy. The Notebooks include instructor contributions and student initials for some combined items.

Further Information¶

Learn more about Archival Studies at Missouri’s iSchool at https://education.missouri.edu/degree/archival-studies-mlis/

Objectives¶

The main objective of the Data Modeling assignment, which is one of the course goals in IS_LT 9492, is to: “Develop skills to mediate among constituencies (records creators, users, and IT staff) over the records lifecycle to ensure perpetual (tiered) access to analog and digital formats.” The objective also aligns with the new 2023 SAA GPAS curriculum components, including but not limited to: (1) Knowledge of archival material and functions, (c) Arrangement and Description, and (e) Reference and Access; and (2) Knowledge of the profession, (c) Professional ethics and values.

Learning Goals¶

• Computational Practices:
  • Data Practice 3 – Manipulating Data
  • Data Practice 5 – Visualizing Data
• Archival Studies Guidelines:
  • Core Archival Knowledge – Archival Material and Functions – Arrangement and Description
  • Core Archival Knowledge – Archival Material and Functions – Reference and Access
  • Knowledge of the Profession – Professional ethics and Values

Software and Tools¶

Students are asked to download one tool – OpenRefine – and use it to import the provided dataset (portion). Doing so will meet the goal of DP 3, Manipulation.

Student groups are encouraged to use additional resources to meet the goal of DP 5, Visualization, some examples of which include Dataviz.tools, Data Biographies, Visualization Tools presented at ARLIS/NA 2021, TALENT Network member Dr. Melanie Walsh’s Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python (2021), and the Usage case studies in Teaching and Learning with Jupyter (2019)

For OpenRefine:

1. Visit the website https://openrefine.org/
2. View the video tutorials.
3. Download the latest stable release per the instructions at https://openrefine.org/download.html

Acquiring or Accessing the Data¶

The members of the TALENT Educator Network (EN) apply their expertise to expand the library of CASES Projects and build the future community of (digital) archival and library educators and practitioners. The FDR Presidential Library & Museum digitizes and provides public access to the Morgenthau Press Conferences transcripts and finding aid on FRANKLIN, its Archon-based web interface (see Gondek’s 2021 presentation “NARA and FDR Library Holocaust Resources”). Dr. Buchanan's collaboration expands earlier work in the Piloting Network by the UMD Core Team, and is made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, IMLS grant RE-252287-OLS-22.

Notebooks¶

1. Year 1: Volume 1 (Nov – Dec 1933): “Treasury, Gold, & Silver”
2. Volumes 1-2 (1 Jan – 30 Aug 1934): “Gold and Silver”
3. Morgenthau Diaries Volumes 3-5 (1935): “Gold, Silver, & Value of American Dollars”
4. Volumes 6-7 (1936): “Gold Standard, Gold Reserve Act of 1934, Exchange Stabilization Fund, & Tripartite Agreement”
5. Volumes 8-9 (1937): “Foreign Exchange, Gold, Silver, Taxes, & Treasury Bonds”
6. Volumes 10-11 (1938): “France (Mexico, China) and Gold”
7. Volumes 12-13 (1939): “Foreign Relations-through-Trade, Silver, & Douglas”
8. Volumes 14-16 (1940): “Manufacturing: Engine, Plant, War, Airplane”
9. Volumes 17-19 (1941): “Defense Savings (Series E) Bond, Great Britain, Germany, & Italy”
10. Volumes 20-22 (1942): “Government Financing and Silver”
11. Volumes 23-24 (1943): “Off-the-Record Content: Intragovernmental Relations, Press Relations, Domestic Tax Policy, War Financing”
12. Volume 25 (1944): “Gold, Silver (International Monetary Fund), Tax, Bonds, & Loans”
13. Volumes 26-27 (1944 – 1945): “Security Bonds”