Tag Archives: UCSF Archives and Special Collections

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

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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 Journals, Historical 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.

Welcome Dick Fine Papers intern Lupe Samano!

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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

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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

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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.

Digital Health Humanities: Showcasing “Archives as Data” for Analysis

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UCSF Archives & Special Collections includes numerous digitized collections documenting health sciences topics ranging from institutional, community, and individual response to illness and disease to industry impacts on public health. We make many of these collections available as data that can be computationally analyzed for health sciences and humanities research.

Voyant Cirrus term frequency visualization generated from AIDS health crisis workshops file data, 1986 from the UCSF AIDS Health Project Records, UCSF Archives & Special Collections (data available in the No More Silence dataset).

If you are curious about working with data from the UCSF Archives and Special Collections, the Digital Health Humanities (DHH) pilot program will showcase our “archives as data” throughout the month. In two upcoming sessions, we’ll provide an orientation to available data as well as methods for finding, accessing, and exploring these data resources:

Voyant Bubbleline term occurrence visualization generated from Letter from the FDA to Purdue re: new drug application for OxyContin Controlled-Release Tablets data, 1995 from the Kentucky Opioid Litigation Documents collection, UCSF Industry Documents Library (data available from from item page link or as part of collection dataset).

Python for Data Analysis series workshops

DHH programming also continues to partner with the Data Science Institute (DSI) to offer workshops on tools and methods well-suited to conducting research with “archives as data.” March workshops in the DSI Python for Data Analysis series will dig in to text analysis using natural language processing and building machine learning models:

Through these workshops and selected companion follow-up sessions with troubleshooting and guided process walkthroughs, researchers can learn and practice data analysis techniques and get familiar with data from our collections. Check out the library’s events calendar to find and register for the latest offerings!

OpenRefine workshops

If you have data you’d like to work with but it needs tidying and preparation attend a DSI OpenRefine workshop. This workshop will cover techniques for cleaning structured data, no programming required! There will be two OpenRefine sessions this month:

Previously-held DHH session slides, linked resources, and recordings are available on the CLE. There you will find materials from a Digital Health Humanities Overview session and recorded walkthroughs for Unix, Python, and Jupyter notebooks basics. Related resources will be updated on the CLE following DHH sessions.

Questions?

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

Spotlight on Carlton B. Goodlett

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Carlton Benjamin Goodlett, PhD, MD (1914-1997) was a San Francisco newspaper publisher, civil rights leader and physician. He practiced medicine at Mount Zion Hospital (now known as UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion) and at that time, was one of only three Black doctors in the city.

His 1997 obituary in Synapse, UCSF’s student newspaper, enumerated his many accomplishments and commitment to social justice. Goodlett graduated magna cum laude from Howard University in 1935. At the age of 23 he received his doctorate in child psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, making him one of the first Black students to receive a PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology. He went on to receive his medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee.

Goodlett’s legacy includes leading boycotts of businesses that discriminated against people of color and participating in student protests at San Francisco State University.  He was also a co-founder of the San Francisco Young Democrats. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Until the emergence of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, Goodlett was the dominant figure in San Francisco’s civil rights movement in securing jobs for African Americans and appointments to important city commissions that blacks had never held.”

Another notable element of the Synapse article is a featured a drawing of Dr. Goodlett by the American graphic artist Emory Douglas (b. 1943). Douglas was the minister of culture and revolutionary artist for the Black Panther Party. He designed the Party’s newspaper, The Black Panther, and was responsible for the publication’s iconic imagery.

For additional resources on Carlton B. Goodlett and Emory Douglas:

Welcome Allison Tracy-Taylor, Oral History Archivist

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We are excited to introduce Allison Tracy-Taylor who joins UCSF Archives & Special Collections as an Oral History Archivist. Allison will be leading the Oral History Program (OHP) supported by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund and Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication that will enable the university to record and preserve diverse voices of the UCSF faculty sharing their stories in their own words and better shape the legacy they leave behind.

 This program aims to better understand and share the history of the health sciences education through recording, transcribing, and preserving oral histories with members of the UCSF teaching and research community and by making these oral histories available to the public. Through engagement with DEI leaders, the project will record their experiences and document efforts to address and remediate inequities in health, health care, and education. The Oral History Program will elevate the narratives, perspectives, and expertise of historically underrepresented populations in the education and research communities at UCSF. This one-of-a-kind public record will address “silences” and gaps in the existing historical narrative. Allison will collaborate with faculty to convene Oral History Advisory Committees at each of the schools to identify and develop the list of interviewees and perform outreach activities related to the program.

Allison Tracy-Taylor, Oral History Archivist
Allison Tracy-Taylor

Collecting and preserving archival material that documents nuanced historical narratives and encourages contemporary conversations has been a major theme of Allison’s work. Most recently as an independent oral historian based in Sacramento, CA, Allison was the project lead for the California State Library website Voices of the Golden State, a curated collection of oral histories exploring many facets of California’s history. She also worked on multiple oral history projects, including a project on the history of the medical device technology industry in Silicon Valley for Stanford BioDesign, and the Documenting the Experiences of Mexican, Filipina, and Chicana Women in California Agriculture Oral History Project for the Center for Oral and Public History at Cal State Fullerton.  

Allison is passionate about supporting oral history practitioners and growing the field into an inclusive, equitable space. She served as the 2019-2020 President of the Oral History Association (OHA), as well as on the OHA’s Council for several years. While president she initiated the development of the OHA’s Guidelines for Social Justice Oral History Work, convened and served on the Independent Practitioners’ Task Force, which developed a robust toolkit for independent oral historians, and chaired a task force that developed remote interviewing guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Community engagement and education have also been central to Allison’s work. Prior to going independent, Allison worked as the Oral History Administrator at the Kentucky Historical Society, overseeing the Kentucky Oral History Commission (KOHC), the only commission of its kind in the United States. She provided outreach, education, and technical support to oral history practitioners and programs throughout Kentucky. Allison was also the Oral Historian for the Stanford Historical Society, documenting Stanford University’s history through the stories of faculty and staff and serving as the program’s senior oral history mentor. 

Allison began her work in oral history at the University of Nevada Oral History Program (UNOHP), serving in multiple roles, including as an interviewer for a multi-year project on the history of women’s athletics at the University of Nevada, and an editor for the resulting book We Were All Athletes: Title IX and Women’s Athletics at the University of Nevada. In addition to an M.A. in Oral History from Columbia University, Allison holds a B.A. in Sociology and English Literature from the University of Nevada. 

In her free time, Allison enjoys hiking, reading, the distinct hobbies of collecting craft supplies and crafting, and baking. Though she will always be a Nevadan at heart, she has come to love the profound beauty of California. 

Launching the Digital Health Humanities Pilot

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We are excited to launch digital health humanities pilot programming starting January 2023! Digital health humanities (DHH) is an emerging discipline that utilizes digital methods and resources to explore research questions investigating the human experience around health and illness. The Digital Health Humanities Pilot (DHHP) will facilitate new insights into historical health data. Participants will learn how to evaluate and integrate digital methods and “archives as data” into their research through a range of offerings and trainings.

Participants at the first workshop for the No More Silence project, a precursor to digital health humanities pilot programming

The programming from this pilot will bring a humanistic context to understanding institutional, personal and community responses to health issues, as well as social, cultural, political and economic impacts on individual and public health. The DHHP will offer researchers from all disciplines (including faculty, staff, and other learners) tailored workshops, classes, and skill-building sessions. Workshops will encourage the use of “archives as data” and utilize datasets from holdings within the UCSF Archives and Special Collections (including the AIDS History Project and Industry Documents Library, among others). Additionally, in spring 2023 we will be hosting the Digital Health Humanities Symposium. The symposium will provide space to consider theoretical issues central to this emerging field and highlight digital health humanities projects. More information on the symposium will be shared soon.

The UCSF Digital Health Humanities Pilot is funded by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund via the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.

Register for an upcoming Digital Health Humanities overview session

Are you interested in learning how DHH can inform your research? We invite you to participate in our virtual session, Digital Health Humanities: An Overview of Methods, Tools, Archives, and Applications, Thursday, January 19, from 1 to 3 p.m. PT.

This session will include an orientation led by Digital Health Humanities Program Coordinator, Kathryn Stine and Digital Archivist, Charlie Macquarie. We will discuss various approaches in DHH research, including getting familiar with data analysis and programming skills, and will share an overview of the UCSF Library’s archival collections data available for research.

For questions about digital health humanities at UCSF, please contact Digital Health Humanities Program Coordinator, Kathryn Stine at kathryn.stine@ucsf.edu.

Register Now

Collaborating with the Data Science Initiative

The Data Science Initiative (DSI) is offering workshops in the coming months to support researchers interested in implementing DHH approaches. Follow-up sessions will be available for researchers to reinforce and contextualize programming foundations in practical application. Check out the upcoming sessions:

We invite you to check out the library’s events and classes calendar for upcoming DHHP (and related DSI) programming. If you are unable to attend any of the sessions listed above, we advise referring to the DSI Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE) (accessible with MyAccess credentials) for recordings and resources.



#ColorOurCollections Coloring Book

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Once again we contributed to the New York Academy of Medicine’s #ColorOurCollections. We’ve created a coloring book featuring images from our collection of Japanese woodblock prints. Please download the book, color, and tweet your creations @ucsf_archives using #ColorOurCollections.

Download the complete UCSF Archives 2022 Coloring Book here.

You can view other coloring books from participating institutions here. Happy coloring!

Peggy Tran-Le Joins UCSF Archives

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Please join us in giving a warm welcome to our new Research and Technical Services Managing Archivist, Peggy Tran-Le. Peggy comes to UCSF with over 15 years of diverse experience as an archivist, most recently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) where she has served as the museum’s Archivist and Records Manager.

Peggy Tran-Le

During her tenure at SFMOMA, Peggy developed and managed the archives programs including planning, policies and procedures, acquisition, description, and processing and preservation of analog and digital institutional records and special collections.  She established the museum’s records management program and advanced museum-wide policies and procedures through developing collaborative relationships and serving as a resource for museum staff regarding SFMOMA’s policies and procedures.

She oversaw research services provided to staff and external researchers, in addition to responding to reference inquiries, assisting researchers on site and remotely, and issuing permissions to publish for archival collections.

Prior to joining SFMOMA, Peggy spent time as an Archivist at the National Archives at San Francisco (NARA) and as the Research Archivist at Pixar Animation Studio. At NARA, she managed the volunteer and intern programs and established priorities for arrangement, description, and preservation of records. While at Pixar, she supported the international tour of PIXAR: 25 Years of Animation and the research for The Art of … series of Pixar art books.

She received a Master of Library and Information Science degree (MLIS) from San Jose State University, a Master of Arts (MA) in Art History from the University of Chicago, and Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Art History and US History from the University of California, Santa Cruz.