Maternal Health and Images of the Body Examined Through Japanese Ukiyo-e

Guest post by Manami Yasui, Manami is a professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan and guest curator for the exhibition “Maternal Health and Images of the Body in Japanese Ukiyo-e.

We are pleased to announce the new exhibition, “Maternal Health and Images of the Body in Japanese Ukiyo-e,” which will be on view on the main floor of the UCSF Kalmanovitz Library at Parnassus Heights from November 2023 through December 2024. This exhibition explores the historical perspectives surrounding the human body and maternal health in Japan through the lens of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings.

The central question driving our selection of images, most of which come from the UCSF Japanese Woodblock Print Collection and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) collection, is how was the human body represented in mid-19th-century Japan? Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese graphic art popularized from the 17th through the 19th-centuries. The exhibition uses a selection of ukiyo-e works and other artifacts from the 1820s to the 1880s. By drawing on various visual arts and medical media, we explore pregnancy and childbirth in early modern Japan and how birth control methods such as abortion and mabiki (infanticide or “thinning out”) were viewed at the time.

Depictions of pregnancy and the fetus

TenRealms 1885
“Ten Realms within the Body,” 体内十界之圖, 1885 by Utagawa Kuniteru III 歌川国輝(三代).

One important representation of the early modern epistemology of the human body from a Japanese lens is seen in this fascinating ukiyo-e print entitled the “Ten Realms within the Body” 体内十界之圖, 1885 by Utagawa Kuniteru III 歌川国輝(三代)(active ca. 1877-1896).  

This print depicts a Japanese woman wearing only an underskirt. She appears to be pregnant and is pointing at her ample abdomen. The interior of her abdomen depicts a series of scenes likened to a Buddhist mandala. The image is likely a parody of the famed “Ten Realms Mandala” (jp. Kanjin jukkai zu), which illustrates the ten states of Buddhist existence surrounding a central “heart” character. Of the ten realms, the upper five represent enlightened states, while the lower half includes one realm representing humanity and the remaining four realms representing “lesser beings,” such as demons or animals. Kuniteru’s version maintains a similar balance with each “realm” by representing facets of human society; however, this version connects Buddhist beliefs with the understandings of pregnancy and life choices during Kuniteru’s time.

RealizeOnesParentaLove 1880
“Realize One’s Parental Love,” 父母の恩を知る図, 1880. Utagawa, Yoshitora歌川芳虎

Putting the interior of the human body on display was one of the hallmarks of visual media during this period. People were interested in the invisible interior of the human body, and the ukiyo-e of the time responded to their desire to peer inside. Another popular set of prints depicts ten pregnant women, each with a fetus at a different stage of growth. While Western medical science measures the length of a full-term pregnancy at nine months (40 weeks), in early modern Japan, a full-term pregnancy was calculated according to the lunar calendar, and was divided into ten four-week periods. This explains why the women depicted in the ukiyo-e, “Realize One’s Parental Love” 父母の恩を知る図, 1880, Utagawa Yoshitora 歌川芳虎 depicts ten stages of growth.

The Chinese (Sinitic) medical body

DietAdviceHealthySexLife 1855
“Model Sexual Practices for Good Health,” 房事養生鑑, 1855. Unknown Artist.

At the same time, the human body in early modern Japan reflected a worldview grounded in Chinese (Sinitic) medical thought. This system classifies organs as consisting of “five viscera and six entrails.” The above print contains advice on conducting one’s sex life through the then-popular mode of “nourishing health” (yōjō), with detailed explanations on important reproductive organs such as the uterus. The small figures within each organ represent the constant motion and labor that each organ undertakes to keep the body functioning.

The introduction of Western anatomy to Japan

While most medical depictions of the body in early modern Japan were informed by Chinese (Sinitic) medicine, European anatomy books, many published in Dutch editions, were imported by Dutch merchants into the port of Dejima in Nagasaki, Kyushu, which was built in 1636. One example was “Remmelin’s Catoptrum Microcosmicum” (1619), which was introduced to Japan via its Dutch version, “Pinax Microcosmographicus” (1667). The book publishers painstakingly printed organs on small flaps of paper that are then layered on top of one another. This book attempted to illustrate holistically male and female bodies, and the inner organs in detail. When the reader flips open the layer depicting the womb, an image of a fetus appears.

CatoptrumMicrocosmicium 1619
“Catoptrum Microcosmicum”, 1619, Johann Remmelin (McGill University collection)

In this exhibition, you can compare both Remmelin’s original (UCSF Archives and Special Collections, 1619) and the Japanese translated edition (Nichibunken collection, 1772). We have also replicated the female body image from the Japanese translation for the exhibition. This provides visitors with a hands-on experience of “exploring” the text by “opening” the abdomen and “removing” the internal organs of the body.

We encourage you to enjoy these diverse images of pregnancy, childbirth, and bodily images from Japan’s Edo period (1603 -1868). We hope viewers will gain a better understanding of early modern Japanese practices around the body, and maternal health, including abortion and mabiki. Along with the UCSF Kalmanovitz Library exhibition, we are also planning to offer online exhibitions in Japanese, English, and Chinese. Please stay tuned for further information.

Exhibition opening reception

We invite the UCSF community and members of the public to attend our opening reception Wednesday, November 1, 2023, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at the UCSF Kalmanovitz Library (Parnassus Heights). Admission is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided while supplies last.

Please register by Friday, October 31, 2023.

REGISTER

AnatomicalAtlasWholeBody 1772
『和蘭全躯内外分合図』”Anatomical Atlas of the Whole Body,” 1772 (Nichibunken collection)
本木了意訳、鈴木宗云撰次Motoki Ryōi, trans (c. 1682), Suzuki Shūun, ed.

Acknowledgements

The exhibition, Maternal Health and Images of the Body in Japanese Ukiyo-e, is a collaboration between the University of California, San Francisco Archives and Special Collections and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the collaborators listed below and the many other colleagues who made this exhibition possible.

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

  • Manami Yasui, PhD, guest curator

Nichibunken Project Team

  • Lawrence Marceau, Noriko Itasaka, Lee I Zhuen Clarence, Michaela Kelly, Chihiro Saka, Hiroshi Fujioka, Ayako Ono, and Yoko Sakai

University of California, San Francisco Library

  • Polina Ilieva, Associate University Librarian for Collections and University Archivist

UCSF Project Team

  • Peggy Tran-Le, Kirk Hudson, and Jessica Crosby

With special thanks to

  • Stephen Roddy, University of San Francisco
  • Mark McGowan, exhibition graphic designer

Feature image credit: “Realize One’s Parental Love” 父母の恩を知る図, 1880. Utagawa, Yoshitora歌川芳虎, courtesy of the UCSF Archives and Special Collections.

New Digital Collections: Selma H. Fraiberg Papers and Helen Fahl Gofman Papers

The UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections is pleased to announce the digitization of the Selma H. Fraiberg papers and Helen Fahl Gofman papers. The digitization of the collections is part of our current grant project, Pioneering Child Studies: Digitizing and Providing Access to Collection of Women Physicians who Spearheaded Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics, supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). The grant supports the creation of digital collections on Calisphere containing materials from five collections held at UCSF. These collections document the life and work of five women physicians and social workers. The finding aids for theses collections are available publicly on the Online Archive of California.

Selma H. Fraiberg

Selma Fraiberg was born in Detroit, Michigan, where she received her education, graduating from Wayne State University with a B.A. in 1940. In 1945, she received her M.S.W. from the same institution and later completed her psychoanalytic training at the Detroit Psychoanalytic Institute. She became lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School at Ann Arbor. By 1968 she was professor of child psychoanalysis, becoming professor emeritus on her retirement in 1979. She was also professor of social casework at Tulane University, 1958-61, and lecturer and supervising child analyst at the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute, 1961-63. In 1967-69 Mrs. Fraiberg was lecturer and supervisor of the Child Psychoanalytic Program, of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1979, she taught at the University of California, San Francisco, as professor of child psychoanalysis, a position she held at her death in 1981. Mrs. Fraiberg was the author of four major books, including The Magic Years (1959) and Insights from the Blind (1977), both written with her husband, and Every Child’s Birthright: In Defense of Mothering (1977). The digital collection includes correspondence, teaching files, typescripts, manuscript drafts, project materials, meeting notes, lecture notes, articles, and grants. Mrs. Fraiberg wrote several articles regarding child development, but also wrote about parental development including one called, On Being the Parent of a Two Tear Old. Fraiberg wrote, “Knowledge of one’s own Imperfections as a parent soften the criticism of childhood. Many parents now discover a new and deeper understanding of themselves and their relationships to their own parents, and a compassion for their own parents which comes out of identification with the parental role.”

Helen Fahl Gofman

Helen Fahl Gofman, MSS 2014-17, carton 44, folder 20

Dr. Helen F. Gofman was involved with teaching, patient care, and research at the University of California for 42 years. Gofman was a national leader in the field of behavioral pediatrics. She completed both her medical degree and a residency in pediatrics at UCSF in 1947. Gofman next was involved with the Child Study Unit (CSU), within the UCSF Pediatrics Department, from the time it was founded in 1948 until her retirement in 1984. She served as director of the CSU from 1961-1973 and co-director from 1973-1983. Upon her retirement in 1984, Gofman was awarded professor emeritus. The digital collection contains documents of the life and work of Dr. Gofman. Materials include writings, lectures, correspondence, publications, research materials, diagnostic tools and tests, photographs, and biographical materials.  Towards the end of her career, Dr. Gofman wrote her Final Note, a note regarding the positive and negative changes she has seen in her field of behavioral pediatrics, she wrote,” I have seen a tremendous change in the teaching and acceptance of biopsychosocial issues as part of pediatric practice…In the field of behavioral pediatrics, there were no textbooks, manuals, or syllabi available; in fact, the term behavioral pediatrics was, as yet, unknown. And yet, I think many pediatric housestaff were hungry for training in this area…It is unfortunate that lack of funds in medical schools, state and federal budgets threaten to stunt it’s growth at this time. I see this as a critical time for behavioral pediatrics and for pediatrics itself.”

The UCSF Digital Health Humanities Interdisciplinary Symposium: Summary and Recordings Release

attendees at a presentation

This summer, the UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections hosted the first UCSF Digital Health Humanities Interdisciplinary Symposium. The symposium brought together researchers working at the intersections of health sciences, data science, and digital humanities. The program kicked off with an introduction to Digital Health Humanities (DHH) at UCSF followed by a lightning talk session. These sessions showcased research projects and works in progress related to this emerging domain. The afternoon sessions were topically-oriented panels and speakers shared their projects and resources for analyzing medical literature and addressing challenges and opportunities when working with historical patient records. The post-session discussions emphasized how researchers across disciplines can converge to compare ways of working with digital methods and historical materials. Multi-disciplinary collaborations can provide significant insights into health and healthcare experiences and influences. Researchers from the UCSF community gave lightning talks covering research processes, exploration and experimentation, early findings, challenges, and new research questions under consideration.

Common threads included:  

  • using industry documents and new analysis methods to identify patterns of industry influence on community organizations and scientific discourse;
  • the role of geography in understanding landscapes of disease and activism;
  • surfacing and confronting omissions in the historical record, particularly that of marginalized communities; and
  • the value and importance of integrating personal experiences in health care provision and historical interpretation of the health sciences.  

Each lightning talk included provocative descriptions of how digital methods have been or could be employed to further understanding of health humanities materials. Presenters also discussed how digital methods can support the inclusion of significant, yet overlooked or underrepresented experiences or perspectives. A forthcoming post will summarize presentations from the lightning talk showcase session. 

Working with historical patient records

A session on the challenges and opportunities of working with historical patient records as data included panelist presentations representing archival, technological, and historical perspectives. UCSF Associate University Librarian for Collections and UCSF Archivist Polina Ilieva shared how archivists can address the access complications presented by historical patient records to realize their potential as the research subject. Methods include digitizing and presenting data within innovative discovery and responsible access platforms proposed by UCSF Archives and Special Collections. Aimee Medeiros, vice chair and associate professor for the UCSF Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, discussed how research benefits from liberating data from historical patient records for quantitative and qualitative inquiry, especially that which expands and deepens understanding of health sciences knowledge networks, including historical structures of oppression, clinical care, and patient and care providers’ social contexts. The panel presentations concluded with Kim Pham, currently research technology officer at the Max Planck Institute. Pham shared both process insights and ethical access considerations from a “collections as data” project she was involved in at the University of Denver that made patient data from historical records of the Jewish Consumptive’s Relief Society available.  

Examining racism in medical literature

Symposium programming closed with a panel presentation and discussion about analyzing medical literature, particularly medical journal archives, to track social topics over time including racism in medicine. Claudia von Vacano the founding executive director and senior research associate of D-Lab and digital humanities at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and Pratik Sachdeva, senior data scientist at the UC Berkeley D-Lab shared an initiative to identify racism narratives in medical literature. Dr. von Vacano explained the need for this project, noting the pervasive reality of structural racism in healthcare and its significant negative impacts particularly on Black and Latino individuals. Sachdeva shared their approach to studying narratives of racism in prominent published medical literature. They identify and analyze racism and power-related terms by adapting a corpus labeling and analysis methodology they established in an earlier D-Lab initiative that measured hate speech.

Melissa Grafe, board member for the Medical Heritage Library, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History and head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale University, presented the range of digitized resources made publicly available by the Medical Heritage Library that can be analyzed to inform research around racism narratives in medicine. This includes State Medical Society JournalsHistorical American Medical Journals as well as the curated collection sets Roots of Racism, and Anti-Black Racism in Medicine. Finally, Moustafa Abdalla, a surgical resident and an independent principal investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, presented on his textual analysis work. Abdalla has conducted computational research at Harvard Medical School and the University of Oxford and shared his findings from text analysis on more than 200 years of the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine articles. He has also built and shared an N-gram viewer for this data to help others conduct exploratory research across the corpus.

Access symposium recordings

The DHH pilot program has been humbled by the breadth and depth of meaningful work presented during the symposium. We are encouraged by the insights, conversations, and opportunities for future collaboration that were seeded throughout the day. As UCSF DHH programming continues and researcher networks grow, we intend to host future events that build upon the momentum from this symposium! All symposium recordings are now available on the UCSF CLE. 

About the Digital Health Humanities program

The UCSF Digital Health Humanities pilot program is funded by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund, via the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication to facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship that advances understanding of the profound effects of illness and disease on patients, health professionals, and the social worlds in which they live and work. The UCSF DHH was launched in 2022 and provides programming and resources to guide and support researchers in their engagement with digital tools and methods. The program also provides resources for working with archives as data.

New Digital Collections: Carol Hardgrove Papers and Hulda Evelyn Thelander Papers

The UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections is pleased to announce the digitization of the Carol Hardgrove papers and the Hulda Evelyn Thelander papers. The digitization of the collections is part of our current grant project, Pioneering Child Studies: Digitizing and Providing Access to Collection of Women Physicians who Spearheaded Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics, supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). The grant supports the creation of digital collections on Calisphere containing materials from five collections held at UCSF. These collections document the life and work of five women physicians and social workers. The finding aids for theses collections are available publicly on the Online Archive of California.

Carol Hardgrove

Carol Hardgrove worked in several nursery and childcare centers and was an educational consultant for Project Head Start from 1966 to 1970. The collection includes correspondence, published and unpublished manuscripts, photographs, and secondary materials on her subjects of interest. One of the items in the collection is an essay, “Play in the Day Care Center” which was written by Mrs. Hardgrove on the interpretation of the word “play”. She writes, “Play means different things to different people; serves different purposes at different stages of development. Play is to the infant, the toddler, and the preschooler the life breath of childhood; the force that carries into experiences of reasoning, relating, rehearsing, and researching. Through play, the child works to understand, to master, to integrate, to try on different roles in fantasy. Children learn through play.”

Another item in the collection is a travel study report called “Parent Participation and Play Programs in Hospital Pediatrics in England, Sweden, and Denmark,” granted by the World Health Organization. She shares her experience in Europe and meeting parents, patients, nurses, psychologists, and physicians. She writes, “I truly learned the meaning of “hands across the sea,” and hope that together, we may continue to work to improve the situation for young hospitalized children and their families.”

hardgrove newspaper
UCSF Journal, February 1978. Carol Hardgrove papers, carton 1, folder 14

Hulda Evelyn Thelander

Hulda Evelyn Thelander, MD, interned at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, and later became the pediatrics department chief in 1951. During WWII she was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, retiring as commander and serving as Chief Consultant for Women Veterans, Western Area. Dr. Thelander founded the Child Development Center at Children’s Hospital in 1952 and conducted studies on children with traumatic brain injuries and general pediatric neurology. The papers in this collection consist in large part of correspondence (many with friends and family members), diaries, memoirs, travel accounts, some medical manuscripts and research notes. Several newspaper articles were written about Dr. Thelander praising her hard work helping children with disabilities. She wrote an essay on the history of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital called “The Department of Pediatrics of Children’s Hospital“. She also wrote several guides to inform parents and the community about children with physical disabilities.

From 1967 – 1971, Dr. Thelander attended medical school for a second time. It had been 40 years since she graduated with her medical degree from the University of Minnesota. She kept a diary about her experience returning to medical school at UCSF. Additionally, in 1971 she received a special citation from the Gold Headed Cane Society completing medical school a second time.

thelander newspaper
“Gentle Hand With The Handicapped,” undated. Hulda Evelyn Thelander papers, carton 3, folder 81

More to come

Next month we will digitize our last two collections of this project and publish them on Calisphere. Stay tuned for our next update.

COVID Tracking Project Records and Resources Now Available

This announcement is authored by COVID Tracking Project Archive Lead, Alex Duryee

The UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections is pleased to announce that the COVID Tracking Project (CTP) records are available online for research.  The CTP is a crowdsourced digital archive that was managed by a group of journalists at The Atlantic and approximately 500 volunteers who gathered, cataloged, and published state-level COVID-19 data over the first fifteen months of the pandemic. “The COVID Tracking Project was a remarkable and influential initiative — part citizen science, part journalism, part crisis response. I’m thrilled that UCSF Archives has acquired, processed, and made available the digital records of this unique organization,” said Amanda French, a digital archivist and key leader of the CTP at The Atlantic.

In addition to the CTP’s data products, this collection includes its data creation and quality records, organizational records, correspondence, and code repositories. Over 2,100 academic articles have cited data from the collection and federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Open records available

The finding aid on the Online Archive of California describes the entirety of the collection and includes all of the CTP records held by UCSF. Records range from data processing infrastructure and documentation, correspondence with state and territorial health departments, original COVID-19 data captures, and Slack discussions like #gratitude and #emoji-march-madness.  A significant portion of the collection is restricted until 2102 to protect the privacy of CTP members. However, the open records are available for digitally and on-site by appointment within the UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections reading room. 

The final data products from the CTP are available on Dryad, in accordance with FAIR principles:

In addition to the final data sets, UCSF developed a tool for viewing the data as it changed over time.  COVID-19 data was never static. Often reporting schedules were inconsistent around weekends and holidays, and data was either reported late or updated long after the initial release. Another factor was that states continuously changed their data definitions throughout the pandemic. UCSF’s Data Explorer lets researchers view CTP’s data as it was updated, providing a more profound view of the topline numbers. Data Explorer includes references to original data sources (generally screenshots of websites and data files) and daily Slack discussions for each reporting source (available on-site at UCSF).

Oral histories and open source tools

Along with the collection’s files and data, the CTP records include oral histories created by the CTP as it came to a close in 2021.  These oral histories provide a human-centered perspective on the data, the organization, and the pandemic in the United States.  With permission from the interviewees, the oral histories are available via Calisphere.

The UCSF Archives and Special Collections also developed several open-source tools to aid in acquisition, preservation, and access to the CTP materials. CTP used platforms like GitHub, Instagram, and Twitter for public and internal communication.  These platforms do not always provide accessible tools for preserving data; thus, UCSF created tools to download posts and private messages and generate access versions in PDF.  These tools are available on GitHub for use in and development of digital archives.

Inspiring future research and education

This collection was designed in adherence to UCSF Library’s Archives as Data initiative and the broader Collections as Data movement. UCSF Archives and Special Collections developed multiple platforms and pathways to approach the collection.

This way researchers across disciplines can discover and use the records in their work. Whether it is from an epidemiological, social science, or data science lens, CTP archive lead Alexander Duryee acknowledges the powerful insights this collection affords, “We believe that this collection will provide key context for the story of the pandemic and that researchers across disciplines will find it illuminating.” By cross-linking between the archival collection, oral histories, and data sets, the collection encourages deep exploration of the “whats” and “hows” of the CTP and its data.

The collection serves as the foundation of the Data Journalism Course In A Box (DJCB) project, which is building a data science curriculum around the CTP records to support journalism education.  The collection includes a comprehensive view of the data, from its initial publication on agency web pages through quality control and publication. Investigative reporter Tyler Dukes is developing the DJCB with the help of the UCSF team. The curriculum uses CTP data to illustrate to journalists how to work with and analyze real-world public health data and how to communicate complex topics to a broad audience.

Project team members

  • Tyler Dukes, data journalism consultant
  • Alexander Duryee, Covid Tracking Project archive lead
  • Edith Escobedo, UCSF project archivist
  • Polina Ilieva, UCSF Associate University Librarian for Collections and archivist
  • Charlie Macquarie, former UCSF digital archivist
  • Kevin Miller, former Covid Tracking Project archive lead

In addition, the team would like to thank the many collaborators across the University of California system and advisory board members for their contributions to this project.

Funding for The COVID Tracking Project Archive was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Sloan grant G-2022-17133).


Student Fellows Explore Machine Learning with UCSF Industry Documents Library and Data Science Initiative

The UCSF Industry Documents Library (IDL) and Data Science Initiative (DSI) teams are excited to be working with three Data Science Fellows this summer. The Data Science Fellows are part of a joint IDL-DSI project to explore machine learning technologies to create and enhance descriptive metadata for thousands of audio and video recordings in IDL’s archival collections.  This year’s summer program includes two junior fellows and one senior fellow.

Our junior fellows are tasked with manually assigning or improving metadata fields such as title, description, subject, and runtime for a selection of videos in IDL’s collection on the Internet Archive. This is a detailed and time-consuming task, which would be costly to perform for the entire collection. In contrast, our senior fellow is using transcriptions of the videos, which we have generated with Google’s AutoML tool, to explore different technologies to automatically extract the descriptive information. We’ll then compare the human-generated data with the machine-generated data to assess accuracy.  The hope is that IDL can develop a workflow for using machine learning to create or improve metadata for many other videos in our collections.

Our Junior Data Science Fellows are Bryce Quintos and Adam Silva. Bryce and Adam are both participating in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Career Pathway Summer Fellowship Program. This six-week program provides opportunities for high school students to gain work experience in a variety of industries and to expand their learning and skills outside of the classroom. Bryce and Adam are learning about programming and creating transcription for selected audiovisual materials. The IDL thanks SFUSD and its partners for running this program and providing sponsorship support for our fellows.

Noel Salmeron is our Senior Data Science Fellow participating in Life Science Cares Bay Area’s Project Onramp. Noel is using automated transcription tools to extract text from audiovisual files, run sentiment and topic analyses, and compare automated results to human transcription. Noel also provides guidance and mentoring to the Junior Fellows.

Our Fellows have shared a bit about themselves below. Please join us in recognizing Bryce, Adam, and Noel for their contributions to the UCSF Library this summer!

IDL-DSI Junior Data Science Fellow Bryce Quintos

Hi everyone! My name is Bryce Quintos and I am an incoming freshman at Boston University. I
hope to major in biochemistry and work in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical field. As someone who is interested in medical research and science, I am incredibly honored for the opportunity to help organize the Industry Documents Library at UCSF this summer and learn more about computer programming. I can’t wait to meet all of you!

IDL-DSI Junior Data Science Fellow Adam Silva

Hi, my name is Adam Silva and I am a Junior Intern for the UCSF Library. Currently, I am 17 years old and I am going into my senior year at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco. I am part of Lincoln High School’s Dragon Boat team and I am also a part of Boy Scout Troop 15 in San Francisco. My favorite activities include cooking, camping, hiking, and backpacking. My favorite thing that I did in Boy Scouts was backpacking through Rae Lakes for a week. I am excited to work as a Junior Intern this year because working online rather than in person is new to me. I look forward to working with other employees and gaining the experience of working in a group.

IDL-DSI Senior Data Science Fellow Noel Salmeron

My name is Noel Salmeron and I am a third-year data science major and education minor at UC Berkeley. I’m excited to work with everyone this summer and looking forward to contributing to the Industry Documents Library!

Welcome Dick Fine Papers intern Lupe Samano!

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to our new intern, Lupe Samano!

Lupe will be working on processing the Dick Fine Papers (MSS 2022-02). UCSF physician Dr. Richard H. Fine (1940 – 2015) worked at the San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, where he served as chief of the adult health center for 25 years and helped found a primary care residency program to train doctors to work with poor and vulnerable patients. The collection contains yearbooks, appointment books, correspondence, clippings, audio/visual material, photographs, and ephemera.

Dick Fine Papers Intern Lupe Samano

Lupe has provided her introduction below:

Hello, my name is Lupe and I recently completed the MLIS program at San Jose State University. I moved to San Francisco in 2013 to attend San Francisco State University where I earned my BA in Philosophy and Religion. The past 6-ish years I worked with kids but didn’t find it in me to pursue teaching. During the COVID pandemic, my program organized a small library cohort, and the librarians there convinced me to pursue a degree in MLIS. I enrolled in the program shortly after and discovered that my true passion lies in archives.

I had the privilege of interning for NPS at the Presidio Park Archives and Record Center where I had a great time learning and exploring about not just archives but the history of San Francisco. I am thrilled for this opportunity to further expand my knowledge of the city’s history and gain more hands-on experience in archival work.

In my free time, I enjoy thrifting, hiking, watching my dog frolic on the beach, and starting coloring pages that I never seem to finish.

Text Analysis Workshops for Digital Health Humanities

Upcoming UCSF Digital Health Humanities programming includes new text analysis workshops in collaboration with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) and the UCSF Data Science Initiative (DSI). These workshops will orient you to the digital health humanities research potential of content from the vast HathiTrust Digital Library and UCSF’s Archives and Special Collections as well as common computational text analysis exploration approaches.

HathiTrust elephant logo with images from UCSF University Publications collection
Images from the UCSF University Publications collection in HathiTrust.

HathiTrust now includes more than 17.5 million digitized volumes from partner research library collections, including the University of California. Many of these volumes are useful for health humanities research, from documentation of institutional history, to government documents and published literature. Content from HathiTrust is made available for computational analysis primarily through HTRC tools and services.

HathiTrust Research Center Data and Tools for Digital Health Humanities: An Overview | May 19, 2023

On May 19, 2023 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. PT, join HTRC’s Associate Director for Outreach & Education Janet Swatscheno, to learn about finding health-related resources in HathiTrust. The session will cover curating resources into collections, finding or establishing a textual corpus for your research, and tools for exploring and analyzing text as data.

Text Analysis for Digital Health Humanities: Using HTRC Data and Tools | May 26, 2023

On May 26, 2023 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. PT, DSI Instructor, Geoff Boushey is offering a companion workshop to the HathiTrust overview that will provide hands-on opportunities to learn and apply Python coding to conduct text analysis. The data will be derived from HathiTrust collection materials, including extracted features (metadata, derived text features, text as tokens) and full text from the publicly available UCSF University Publications collection, which documents histories of health sciences teaching, learning, and student activities from 1864 – 2009.

Jupyter Notebook Collection Data Exploration: No More Silence | June 2, 2023

Are you interested in familiarizing yourself with Python and using Jupyter Notebook to explore datasets? Join digital archivist, Charlie Macquarie, and DSI instructor Geoff Boushey on June 2, 2023 for a day-long novice-friendly workshop. They will guide you step-by-step through a data exploration notebook tailored to exploring a sample of the No More Silence dataset. You will get familiar with common data preparation and analysis tasks using Python. Research questions and attendant code will increasing in complexity throughout the session. This workshop is designed for learners who are new to computational textual analysis but have basic familiarity in Python programming concepts.

The No More Silence dataset represents materials from the AIDS History Project collections. The collections provide numerous opportunities to identify and contextualize how activists, journalists, researchers, and care providers responded to the epidemic and developed critical relationships.

Questions?

Please contact Digital Health Humanities Program Coordinator, Kathryn Stine, at kathryn.stine@ucsf.edu with questions about digital health humanities at UCSF. The UCSF DHH pilot is funded by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund via the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.

The UCSF Diversity and Health Equity in Health Sciences Education (DHEHS) Oral History Project

In 2023, the UCSF Archives & Special Collections is embarking on an ambitious oral history project that seeks to elevate the narratives, perspectives, and expertise of historically underrepresented populations in the education and research communities at UCSF. Through engagement with DEIA leaders from each of the four schools (Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy), we will record their experiences and document efforts to address and remediate inequities in health, health care, and health sciences education. Taking a profile approach, the goals for each interview will be informed by that person’s life history and experiences. At the conclusion of this one-year project we will organize a public event to introduce this new research corpus to the UCSF community.

Oral history is one of the many tools Archives & Special Collections uses to document different facets of UCSF’s history. One especially important project, the “Diversity in US Medical Schools” series, focused on policies pursued by UCSF and Stanford University medical schools to increase racial and ethnic diversity from the 1960s to the 2000s. This collection contains interviews with Julius R. Krevans, Philip R. Lee, John A. Watson, John S. Wellington, and others, and documents an important chapter in the university’s work to increase the diversity of medical students at the university. Oral history is a valuable tool because it allows us to document personal stories and remembrances often missed in paper records. As in efforts like the “Diversity in US Medical Schools” series, the DHEHS Oral History Project seeks to understand not just what, for example, DEIA initiatives UCSF has pursued, but why those who led these efforts chose a particular path and how their previous experiences influenced their thinking. Further, we can ask interviewees to reflect on these efforts from the present day and consider the long term impact of their work, including what was successful, and how they might have done things differently.

A selection of title pages from the “Diversity in US Medical Schools” oral history series, one of Archives and Special Collections’ many important oral history collections.

The first phase of the DHEHS Oral History Project includes forming advisory committees at each of the four schools. The advisory committees’ primary purpose is to develop and prioritize a list of interviewees from their respective schools. Projects of all types benefit from advisory committees, and oral history projects are no different. Especially for projects documenting institutional history, oral history practitioners can come in with little prior knowledge, and must learn as much and they can as quickly as possible. Advisory committees are an ideal group to provide institutional knowledge and expertise efficiently and strategically. For the DHEHS Oral History Project, with support from deans and administrators at all four schools, we’re fortunate to have all the advisory committees established, and all are in various stages of identifying potential interviewees and prioritizing who should be interviewed for this project. Interviewing should commence in the next quarter, and we look forward to hearing the personal experiences of those doing essential work around DEIA and health equity at UCSF.