IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019 - 22

and those he checked out from the New York
practical reason is that, in Europe, there
Public Library, some of which are still in
is a greater appreciation of and more
the stacks. Some of his scribblings had
funding for the humanities than in Ameribeen erased, for various reasons, leaving beca, but the truth of the matter is that
hind only the imprint of his pencil.
Barney loves Europe.
Olsen-Smith and his research
She has a special affinity for Gerteam searched for any books
many, where she has had a few
Melville had written in and
sabbaticals including a threethen scanned their pages,
month stint at the Techcataloging them in Melnische Universität of Dortville's Marginalia Onmund to work on a project
line. He reached out to
studying postcards from
Barney, who was known as
World War I. She was put
an expert in optical charup in a university rental in
acter recognition (OCR),
a hamlet where she attendDr. Elisa Barney
for help with the docued church, made lifelong
ment analysis, and the
friends, and practiced her
team was awarded a grant to continue
German. Each day, she walked the short
their research. Barney worked with one
distance to the university to meet with an
of her students to modify an open source
electrical engineering professor named
OCR program to read the published text on
Gernot Fink.
each page where Melville had made an anWorld War I was the first industrialnotation. In addition, one of Olsen-Smith's
ized war in history, and technology played
students added the markup of where the
a large role in the development of the
annotations were. Barney and Olsen-Smith
military postal service. All told, 28 billion
have used this to correlate Melville's muspieces of mail were sent between the front
ings to the book text. The results of their
line and the home front. Eighteen million
digital text analysis of Melville's marginalia
pieces of mail were shipped daily, and 25%
in The Dramatic Works of William Shakeof these were postcards. A collaborating
speare were published in Leviathan: A
historian, Dr. Britta Bley, had a large colJournal of Melville Studies in June of 2018.
lection of these postcards.
Barney's task was to take parts of the
postcard analysis from a manual to an autoPostcards from the Front
mated process. While computers cannot yet
Throughout her career, Barney traveled
perform automatic transcription, she knew
to Europe for many collaborations. One

FIONA MONTAGNE

BRITTY BLEY

It "just made sense" for Barney to reach
across the Boise State campus in 2011
to form a partnership with Dr. Steven
Olsen-Smith in the English Department. When Barney was hired, she was
only the sixth employee in the newly
formed Electrical Engineering Department. Words, whereas larger and older
universities might have long-standing
divisions, at Boise State, there were
no silos because they were too small to
build a silo. Transdisciplinary research
is the norm.
Olsen-Smith, an expert in Melville
studies, was researching where Herman
Melville got his ideas. What had he been
thinking as he was writing? Some authors
leave behind troves of notes but not Melville. He had been a wildly popular author
while he was living, but by the time he
passed away in 1891, his books had gone
out of fashion, and he was a relative unknown. His family tossed his notes, never
thinking that there would be a giant resurgence in Melville's popularity after his
death and that his notes would be valuable one day.
This left researchers like Olsen-Smith
with little to study except for the books
Melville himself had read. Melville wrote in
books. His scrawling penmanship, squiggles,
doodles, arrows, and other marginalia can
be found not just in his own collection but
also in the books he borrowed from friends

FIONA MONTAGNE

Melville's Marginalia

Digital image processing was used to help historians analyze
postcards from World War I, allowing researchers to find out
more about the people, their history, and their humanity.

22

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

DECEMBER 2019	

Barney created a high-resolution 3D model of this copper
scroll believed to be from Qumran.



IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019

Contents
IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019 - Cover1
IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019 - Cover2
IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019 - Contents
IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019 - 2
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IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019 - 36
IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019 - Cover3
IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019 - Cover4
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