This interview with DHLab Director Peter Leonard, Program Manager Catherine DeRose, and Director of Communications for the Library Patricia Carey comprises The Stacks, a conversation series published by The Yale Historical Review.

1. INTERVIEW
SCANNED AND
DELIVERED
How the DHLab made remote research work
I would like to start this conversation on research
during COVID with a simple question. How did you
navigate the transition from residential to remote
learning in March? (Peter Leonard) Back in March, we
paid close attention to the messages from Peter Salovey,
Scott Strobel, Susan Gibbons, and other members from
the community. At the time, everybody just tried to
keep up with the news and predict the next steps. And
we didn't always get it right. As a student, you probably
did not expect that you would not return after leaving
for Spring Break.
We actually had a couple days to think about the libra-
ry space before the shutdown. We discussed some new
guidelines about social distancing and de-densification.
We also collaborated with our facilities team to spread
the tables out and to take some of the chairs out of cir-
culation before the shutdown.
Of course, the library has never been completely empty.
Security and facilities staff ensure that the building is
safe. I'm sure this is also true of the medical library, and
all the other branch libraries. These are enormous com-
plex buildings that are never unattended.
We're trying to think about how to safely reopen library
spaces. We already have restarted library services, and
of course many library services never stopped. For exa-
mple, subject librarians have built upon internal expe-
rience and work with faculty and students. Everybody
in the library has volunteered and has tried to step up
these consultations over Zoom. Since June, you can get
books instead of coffee at what used to be Thain Cafe. In
addition, we can scan and deliver to the limits that we
were able to do before.
Many students will not be in New Haven. For this rea-
son, the library will try to equalize access to informa-
he folks at the Digital Humanities Lab have been working
through the pandemic to provide remote research to Yale
students and professors. DHLab Director Peter Leonard,
ProgramManagerCatherineDeRose,andDirectorofCommunications
for the Library Patricia Carey spoke with Editor-in-Chief Henry Jacob
about their efforts this summer.
T
1YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW
Interview by Henry Jacob, SY ‘21 Transcribed by Sharmaine Koh Mingli, SC ‘22JULY 23, 2020

2. tion and resources, whether that's a print book on the
shelf or a conversation with a history librarian. Every-
body within the library is committed to doing whatever
they can to smooth over the challenges that will arise in
the virtual semester.
Above all, we focus on health and safety. I hear the
words “environmental health and safety” all the time.
Normally we think of that as a bureaucracy which helps
out in wet labs. But in the current moment, “environ-
mental health and safety” has helped us to think about
material safety.
You mentioned the complexity of the libraries at
Yale in their managerial and physical organization.
Is there any part of the library that you used to see
and love every day that you miss now? (PL) We just
finished a great renovation of the Bass Library under-
ground space. Everybody feels that Bass isn't the same
without Yale students in it. We want undergrads to be at
home in the library again as soon as possible and make
use of these beautiful spaces, whether it's a dusty book
stack from the 30s in Sterling, or a new study table in
Bass.
I definitely wish I had a few more dusty books on my
shelf at home. That being said, I can access plenty of
materials from my computer. How has the library
managed to provide these resources to the commu-
nity? (Patricia Carey) I should mention the HathiTrust
emergency temporary access, which was a major win.
Under this agreement, we can provide temporary ac-
cess, through the HathiTrust Digital Library, to the
e-book versions of almost 5 million volumes that are on
the shelves in Sterling, Bass, and elsewhere in the library
system but couldn’t be accessed because of the pande-
mic.
I also found it really interesting talking to librarians
who are doing instruction online and are seeing more
students in their workshops than would have attended
in person. Cathy [Catherine DeRose], maybe you can
speak more about this.
(Catherine DeRose) Yes, that has been my experience
too. We had to retool workshops for a Zoom universe.
In person, you can get a sense for the pacing of the
workshop. You can see on people's faces and in their
body language whether you need to speed up or slow
down. It’s a little harder to get that information via
Zoom. So we've had to think about new ways of tea-
ching.
In the DH Lab we have expanded our GitHub repo-
sitory. We have long used this space for tutorials. But
we usually post them after the tutorial happens. Now,
we've been adding more workshop materials and pos-
ting them before the workshop begins, giving students
much more flexibility.
(PC) And Cathy, you have participated in the Yale
Young Global Scholars Program for several years. And
this was the first year that it was conducted online. Do
you want to say anything about that?
(CD) It goes back to Tricia’s comment— when we turned
everything to Zoom, we were actually able to admit
more people into the workshop than we had in years
prior. Before, we taught the Yale Young Global Scholar
sessions in one of the Bass computer classrooms. Back
then, we had to cap the number to the space. But in a
remote environment, we could open it up to more stu-
dents.
(PL) It will be really exciting for our team to think
about the diversity of material in the collections at Yale.
I wrote my dissertation on literature; if you're like me,
you spend your time reading novels. I think of books
in the most traditional sense, hard-bound and on the
shelf. But, of course, the Special Collections make Yale
stand out in the world.
Faculty are passionate about gaining access to those
sources again. We can actually get some of those tra-
ditional novels, hardcover books, special collections,
“How do we minimize
barriers to collections,
[...] How do we provide
access to that material
for people who can't
come in physically?”
2 DHS LAB

3. image assets in the arts library, data sets, even historical
African American newspapers from Philadelphia over
30 years ago. We can get raw data and original scans,
not just a website to browse those old newspapers. Last
week, I processed 94 million files of ProQuest historical
newspapers from the United States, England, and Chi-
na.
What's really exciting and challenging about what the
library can do is to think about how to provide access
beyond those hardcover books. How do we get people
access to datasets if their Internet at home isn’t very fast?
Digital surrogates can go a small amount of the way, but
they can't go all the way.
How do we minimize barriers to collections, whether
it's books, data, special collections, images, or micro-
film? How do we provide access to that material for
people who can't come in physically?
This will be the real challenge. Zoom provides the
answer to the question of individual access to personal
knowledge. What we don't quite have the answer to yet,
is the distribution of the wealth of collections. What can
we do to minimize the disruption and ensure that eve-
ryone has access to all this material across digital and
physical aspects?
(CD) On Peter’s point about finding electronic re-
sources, I should highlight one library initiative that
started before COVID that has been especially helpful
during these times. A team led by a cross-departmental
task force in Technical Services worked to create new
tags that make it easier for people to discover large-
scale data—from historical periodicals to government
documents—that the library licenses for text mining.
The group has even sent a proposal to the Library of
Congress to get tags such as “Data sets” and “Text data
mining” officially recognized.
Yale has really been at the forefront of thinking about
how to make resources available for text and data mi-
ning. With these tags in place since the fall 2019 semes-
ter, the library was already in a good spot for what en-
ded up being a remote spring.
These comments on Yale’s pioneering efforts to demo-
cratize information bring me to our next topic. Peter
and Cathy, you have taught me how to use Tropy and
ArcGIS over the past months. We have all mentioned
various ways the library has adapted. Now I want to
discuss how you three have shifted into the COVID
research landscape. Have you developed any skills du-
ring the lockdown that you wouldn't have otherwise?
(CD) The DH Lab has a Digital Humanities Teaching
Fellows Program. In this program we work with gra-
duate students who are teaching fellows in classes. Our
cohort convenes every semester to think about how we
can integrate digital tools into classes.
We found that lot of collaborative tools translated really
well to the virtual classroom. One of them was Hypothe-
sis, a tool for crowd-sourced annotation. With Hypo-
thesis, students can engage with each other's comments
on the document online. This way, our DH fellows kept
their classes connected despite the circumstances.
We also used Story Maps. This platform lets you com-
bine any visual, textual, audio, and spatial information.
Story Maps is free, but also offers an enterprise version
that Yale has purchased. With the enterprise version, we
could set up a folder where students could share mate-
rials with one another. As you mentioned with Tropy,
we have tried to figure out what tools we can use to help
people work together from a distance.
(PC) In general, people have recognized the value of GIS
at a new level throughout this pandemic. The GIS libra-
rian Miriam Olivares has just done some really, really
interesting consultations with research groups, and she
has worked with the Medical School to create dynamic
maps to show different aspects of the pandemic.
(PL) There's definitely a lot of focus on what some
call “the spatial turn in history”. [Associate Professor
of the History of Science] Bill Rankin is a wonderful
cartographer. Bill is a great example of somebody who
is incredibly skilled and he knows how to do so much,
and so we actually don't see him too often because he
doesn't need our help. He's always building amazing
maps that talk about race, class, and space. I think he is
a great example of work that is deeply rooted in huma-
nistic inquiry. He's not using GIS to look for oil and gas.
It's a kind of humanistic GIS.
(CD) I want to pick up again on that “silver lining” point
you raised earlier, Henry. Esri holds a massive user
conference every year. They made it entirely virtual this
year and free for anyone to attend. Remote living has
made these meetings more accessible. To give another
3YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW

4. example, The Digital Humanities Conference will take
place this weekend and will follow a similar open policy.
In a way, our conversation has followed two threads,
one of excitement and one of concern. We have plenty
of reasons to look forward to the fall. But worries
still linger about the reopening process. How do you
balance these emotions as we near September? (PC)
I serve on two of the reopening task forces. I spend a
lot of my day immersed in questions about whether
we need to quarantine materials and how to maintain
COVID-appropriate distance between people in library
spaces. How do we communicate and manage expecta-
tions for this different kind of experience in the libra-
ries? What are the most essential pieces of that expe-
rience to preserve?
The university as a whole is doing this in a really careful
and thoughtful way. There are lots of uncertainties, so
we have to communicate what people can expect when
they get here. We focus a lot on how to reopen the libra-
ries. In one of the meetings the other day, we started to
talk about, “Okay, what happens if there's an outbreak?
How do we walk this back? Are there steps we can plan
now?” I’m pretty optimistic, but the complexity is daun-
ting.
(PL) We've definitely seen some universities rethink
their opening plans, some who hoped to go totally on
campus, and some have had to become more flexible.
I think that's what we want to see — response to the
local situation. We're still lucky in Connecticut. We'll
see if that continues going forward. But of course, Yale
doesn't draw only from Connecticut. It needs to invite
people back from Florida, from Georgia, from all over
the place, and California, where I'm from. No matter
what happens in terms of the mix of residential versus
remote, folks in the library will work as hard as they can
to equalize access to materials, human resources, and
staff expertise.
That's about all we can do because we're not in control
of the virus. We're not in control of its spread. We’re all
very fortunate to work in an environment which has
access to not just the Yale Health Center and its care,
but also its affiliated major research hospital. In a sense,
we're very well positioned for meeting this challenge.
(CD) Now that we've had the spring semester and a half
of summer of experience, we've gotten better at buil-
ding in redundancy for the kinds of support that we
offer. We discovered when we were working with the
Yale Young Global Scholars, that Google and GitHub
are banned in some countries. In order to make those
materials accessible to students, we had to think about
alternative formats. Sending them a PDF, for instance,
was one solution.
As a library, we have thought a lot about how we can
offer our support in multiple formats. Yes, we can do
Zoom Chat, we can also talk by phone or email, we can
send video recordings. I'm trying to think about alter-
native ways of presenting the material so that everyone
can access it.
This is a time for adjusted expectations and collabo-
ration across boundaries. How have you established
relationships with colleagues from divergent disci-
plinary or institutional backgrounds? (PL) The folks
that I work with include some people who think a lot
about collection development, which is just a fancy
word for buying material. Tricia brought up a great exa-
mple about HathiTrust. HathiTrust grew out of the uni-
versities that have scanned books as part of the Google
Books project. Then they formed their own nonprofit to
help manage information there.
4
“No matter what
happens in terms of
the mix of residential
versus remote,folks
in the library will
work as hard as they
can to equalize access
to materials,human
resources,and staff
expertise.”
DHS LAB

5. YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW
In terms of disciplines within the academy, I think this
crisis creates really interesting opportunities for people
to think about issues outside their field. The last couple
of months have seen a great deal of discussion around
historical patterns of racial discrimination and conti-
nuing patterns of police violence. And I think that most
humanists that you speak to have recommitted them-
selves to think about other ways of doing their work.
But there are also more ambitious projects to work on
the history of race relations in this country. At Rich-
mond, they're working on a project in their digital scho-
larship lab that connects redlining to public health, spe-
cifically with COVID-19 infections in Richmond. There
are opportunities, despite the uncertainty, despite the
crisis, to put public health in conversation with urban
history and structural discrimination.
(CD) I will add that institutional partnerships around
instruction have been springing up as well. The Ha-
thiTrust Research Center, which is a branch from
the HathiTrust Library, developed a remote four-day
workshop series on using digital tools for text mining
with the HathiTrust Library as their data set. We sub-
mitted a proposal to be a virtual co-host for that and
just found out that it was accepted! So you're getting ad-
vance notice that we will be co-hosting that workshop
series, along with the University of Maryland with the
HathiTrust Research Center instructors. That'll be hap-
pening in early October.
Oh, that’s great! A little teaser, I guess. (PC) Hen-
ry — there’s a really interesting project that’s going on
that grew out of the fact that we had a lot of staff whose
work cannot be done from home. People were looking
for useful, meaningful things for them to do, so an ini-
tiative was created to transcribe digitized archival ma-
terial from Beinecke Library collections to make them
full-text searchable. That group has now transcribed
more than 3,600 documents, including material from
the James Baldwin Collection, the Langston Hughes
Collection, and the Edith Wharton Collection.
Just the other day, I had the privilege of sitting in on
a phone call with some staff who are working on this
initiative. Most of these staff don’t normally handle
archival materials. They talked about their experience
reading these materials as they transcribed them. One
person was transcribing letters from Alfred Sully, a Ci-
vil War-era military officer. She talked about reading in
these letters about the casual, callous mistreatment of
Native Americans, and then extrapolating those injus-
tices to what's going on right now in our society. I found
it really moving. So I think this opportunity to make
historical documents more accessible to researchers is
a real silver lining!
Thank you for bringing this initiative to my attention.
On the topic of exploring new quarantine activities,
what you are reading, watching, or enjoying during
your free time? (PL) I think it's a cliché to say you're
reading The Great Flu of 1918, but that's one book I'm
working through.
(CD) I have actually switched over from reading to a
course on web development from Udemy. This has been
a great way to help me get a better grip on some of the
technologies that we use in the lab. When we can meet
in person again, I'll be better equipped to talk about
those things with students.
(PL) Out of curiosity, do you have any friends who are
deciding to take a semester off voluntarily?
I would have given you a different answer in March
than I will provide now. Months ago, plenty of my
friends and I seriously considered taking time off
from Yale. But my plans have shifted.
Underclassmen — especially incoming first years —
face a harder decision. Would you really want to start
college under these circumstances? I’m lucky to have
experience in the stacks and in the archives. In ad-
dition, I have cultivated relationships with students,
professors, and librarians over the last three years.
Despite the uncertainty that lies before us, I am
heartened once more by how people can connect on
Zoom. I’ve never met any of you in person, but I have
gotten to know each of you this summer. To end, I
must thank you again for coming and talking with
me today. I look forward to continuing these conver-
sations in person.
5
HENRY JACOB is a senior in Saybrook
majoring in History and pursuing a Certificate
in Spanish. He is currently conducting
research on Panama. When not responding
to emails for the YHR, Henry tries to convince
his parents to adopt a COVID cat.