Interning in the ISAW Library: Reflections on encoding ISAW Papers in XHTML for publication

A guest post by Robert Rhinehart, a dual degree student at NYU and Long Island University, reporting on his experience as a scholarly communications intern in the ISAW Library.

As this academic year comes to an end, so does my time as an intern with the digital publications team at ISAW, and I would like to use this space to reflect on the project and how I envision taking my experience with ISAW Papers into the future.

First, an introduction. I am currently a dual degree student at NYU and Long Island University, working towards an M.A. in Costume Studies and an M.S. in Library and Information Science. Through this program, I was fortunate enough to work with ISAW Papers this spring in an internship that involved converting recently submitted articles to their web-encoded, internet-ready versions. Admittedly, I was nervous beginning this work, as I would not consider myself a particularly tech-savvy person, and I have had little coding experience up to this point. Reading, writing, and visual analysis have always been my academic comfort zones, but with beginning a new educational journey, I wanted to push myself and learn new skills.

I was drawn to this opportunity for two reasons. The first is ISAW Papers’ commitment to open access—a concept that I had only learned once I began my library science program and have now come to appreciate—as well as the team’s work on promoting the longevity and discoverability of these scholarly articles by making them machine-readable. The second reason is ISAW's academic focus on the ancient world. As an undergraduate, I majored in Classical Archaeology and even worked for two summers on the Huqoq Excavation Project; so the ancient world is a familiar setting for me. This familiarity made the prospect of learning technical skills in an academic environment like ISAW much more approachable, and after some internal debates, I finally decided to move forward with the opportunity. 

I began the internship with essentially no prior experience with XHTML, HTML, CSS, and related technical skills. However, thanks to the guidance of ISAW Associate Research Scholar, Patrick J. Burns, I was given the tools and training needed over the first few weeks. After several tutorials and one-on-one sessions, I felt confident enough to begin marking up my first article in XHTML.

But I soon realized that this process, while at points straightforward, required an editorial approach that merges the affordances of XHMTL mark-up—namely, machine readability, use of Linked Open Data, and document preservation—with the intentions of the author’s presentation and formatting of their article. 

My work started with marking up an article from a special issue based on ISAW’s 2020 online conference, “Re-Rolling the Past,” specifically co-organizer Daniela Wolin’s article “Gender Across the Board: Representations in Ancient World-Themed Games.” This article examines how gender and other social identities are represented in the artwork of analog and video games that are centered on the ancient world. Initially, I assumed that the digital editing work would be straightforward—I would simply mark up the text to indicate the different paragraphs and sections, adding titles, and a few links occasionally. But I soon realized that this process, while at points straightforward, required an editorial approach that merges the affordances of XHMTL mark-up—namely, machine readability, use of Linked Open Data, and document preservation—with the intentions of the author’s presentation and formatting of their article. While marking up this first article, I had to consider both the best coding practices to ensure uniformity with previous ISAW publications while staying true to Wolin’s formatting and its role in communicating the argument. This middle ground between the technical and the editorial was a place that I rarely had, if ever, found myself prior to graduate studies, but this anecdote serves as an excellent representation of my library science experience thus far.

I continued this work with a second article called “Agoranomika: Playful approaches to teaching the serious economic and institutional history of measurement in the ancient Greek world” by David M. Ratzan, the Head of the ISAW Library. The article is not only a publication on the positive pedagogical impacts of games in ancient studies classrooms but also provides guidelines for teachers to replicate the game in their classrooms. This article required me to approach the mark-up from the standpoint of preservation and readability and moreover to think about the article as a tool for the use and enjoyment of teachers and students learning about the ancient world. It was an example of something I noticed both in coursework as well as in my time at ISAW, namely that library science often works by balancing the requirements of a controlled system with the need to make it work for its users. This experience has shaped my understanding of library science and affected how I hope to approach my work in costume studies.

Since costume studies is a relatively young field of study, especially when compared to similar fields like art history and archaeology, scholars have a unique opportunity to steer this field decisively towards the values of open access, the long-term preservation of resources, and linked Open Data that ISAW Papers strives towards. There are currently some notable open-access, fashion-based journals, such as Fashion and Textiles and Fashion Studies, with articles on journals’ web pages and available as downloadable PDFs. What I have come to think in my work with ISAW Papers is that, as more and more resources in fashion studies and beyond are born-digital, it is vital to think about the preservation of published materials and how we can increase the interconnectivity of resources to create a more dynamic and accessible network of fashion scholarship. Though fashion can often seem ephemeral and exclusive, the scholarship does not have to be. 

I am grateful for the opportunity to work with ISAW Papers this semester and to return to the ancient world as I continue my educational journey. I would like to thank ISAW Papers Editor Sebastian Heath, David Ratzan, and, in particular, Patrick J. Burns for giving me this opportunity and for guiding me through this process.