The printer’s mark of Wynkyn de Worde, 1499.

The Mark of the Renaissance Printer is a project whose focus begins with the windows of the Thompson Memorial Library. The arched windows of the north and south wings, as well as those in the Class of 1951 Reading Room, contain printer’s marks – symbols developed during the 15^th and 16^th centuries to identify the printers of books and their printing presses.  Originally, eighty-two of these marks were installed in the library; today, due to renovation, only sixty-six remain. In 1917, librarians published a short pamphlet, which included only the names of the printers and their years of activity – leaving biographical information and historical context unknown and, in effect, inaccessible.

My aim has been to compile biographies for each printer, taking into account their progress and innovations in the art of printing, as well as their cultural involvements – both religious and political. Accordingly, the initial focus opens up from a study of Vassar’s own history into a tracing of both the development of printing and its lines of visual and cultural continuity and transmission. In addition to writing these biographies, and analyses of the marks themselves, I am publishing my entries to a website within Vassar’s Digital Library.

The digital portion of my project serves two purposes: the first, to enhance the digital archives that contain the visual artifacts of Vassar’s celebrated heritage; the second, to aggregate information into an accessible and comprehensive collection of historical data with corresponding bibliography. These components of my project belong to the growing field of the digital humanities, which explores the benefits of transferring materials and resources into more readily available domains.

Katherine Durr ’15

The history of the Susquehannock Indians begins with their migration from Southern New York down the Susquehanna River looking for trade and ends with their demise in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Along the way, they gained the reputation of being giants, cannibals, and traders, along with killing other native groups they came into contact with.

My Ford summer research project with Dr. April Beisaw in the anthropology department and Michael Carraher, a geography major, focused on reinterpreting the history of the Susquehannock. We started with the questions 1) How did the Susquehannock react to a changing social environment?, and 2) How was this is reflected in their artifacts. In addition to reading site reports and papers about the Susquehannock, we took trips to museum archives and historical societies in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., and New York to examine artifacts found at sites linked to the Susquehannock.

A Susquehannock as depicted on Captain John Smith’s map of 1608.

I was specifically interested in the ceramic artifacts. When it comes to ceramics, there are specific design elements, such as overall vessel shape and decorative patterns, that can be examined to see patterns of interaction and cultural change.

Four pottery vessels showing variation in shape and decorative patterns.

Re-analyzing Susquehannock pottery with new social theory regarding how such artifacts reflect changing identity allowed us to remove previous biases inherent in the old story of the Susquehannock. It was a challenge to separate previous interpretations from my own data and create new understandings about a group of people based solely on objects. It was especially difficult to re-examine artifacts that have already been given a name and place within Susquehannock history.

Our research this summer is part of a new story about the Susquehannock that does not involve giants, cannibals, or murderers. It is a story about cultural adaptation and transformation in reaction to social and environmental change. More research and data analysis will be done in the future to further test this interpretation.

Sarah Mincer

This project consists of an experimental part and a theoretical part and it aims to examine the relationship between institutional trust, people’s trust for the society (the legal system in this case), and the contract designing process. For instance, this is intuitive to think that the more people trust the court, the more willing they are to make contracts, because they believe that contracts will be enforced and their interests respected. We want to test this idea and we do so by creating an experiment that mimics the contract making process.

The experiment involves an investor and an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is tasked to offer a contract to attract investment. The investor would then choose whether and how much to invest based on her knowledge of the trustworthiness of the court and the entrepreneur. The game gets repeated in different combinations of the trustworthiness. By examining the contracts that the parties come to, we hope to find some patterns of behavior.

The game tree

In the theoretical part of the project, we calculated the theory-predicted equilibrium contracts, and we found that in general, the entrepreneur would be better off offering a lower return and committing to following the contract than if she offers a high return and later on decides to break the contract.

The next step for the project is to add another treatment. If the entrepreneur paid something back to the investor in the last round, she would get a start in front of her name. We expect this reputation signal to affect the entrepreneur’s behavior, and in particular to make them more trustworthy.

Claire Oxford ’14

Sarah Pearlman & Sukanya Basu

For my Ford Scholars project, I am working on recoding data and analyzing the relationship between drug-related violence and migration in Mexico with Professors Sukanya Basu and Sarah Pearlman. Professors Basu and Pearlman are working on a paper that uses kilometers of federal toll highway in Mexico as an instrumental variable to measure violence-related migration. For the Ford project, I am assisting with research to break their state-level analysis down to a municipal level. Ultimately, the project is meant to show that using federal toll highway kilometers to instrument for changes in homicides, which they have shown is significant on a statewide level, works on a municipal level as well. Most of the data used for the project comes from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI). I collected municipal level homicide, population, and migration data. After downloading the data sets from INEGI, I created STATA do-files to merge the data and create dummy variables to use in regressions. Additionally, I created maps of Mexico that showed the geographic distribution of the violence; see Image 1 for an example of these maps. Furthermore, I assisted with additional research by reading contemporary economic papers also examining the drug-related violence in Mexico. Our initial results suggest that the relationship between drug-related violence and migration holds on a municipal level. Furthermore, we see that the highway kilometers instrument still works. We still have additional work to do in determining what controls we want to use and whether or not we want to look at the total homicides per capita in a municipality as a measure of violence, or if we want to look at the change in homicides as a measure of the increase in violence as a result of the war on drugs.

Figure 1

Welcome to the Ford Scholar WordPress site for 2013!  Below is a calendar of the summer’s important dates, as well as the date for the Fall symposium.  Please note these dates:

Tuesday, May 28 — 10 am, Information Session in the Library Electronic Classroom

Tuesdays, June 4, June 18, July 2, 16, and 30  – URSI/Ford BBQs, 5 pm on Olmsted Lawn

Wednesday, June 19 – Ice Cream Social, 3-4 pm, Faculty Commons

Tuesday, July 9—Poster Workshop ,10-11:30 am; WordPress Workshop, 11:30 am-12:30 pm

Tuesday, July 16—Poster Workshop, 10-11:30 am; WordPress Workshop, 11:30 am-12:30 pm

Wednesday, July 17—WordPress posting of your 250-300 word project   summary plus 1 or 2 images that relate to your project posted to               http://pages.vassar.edu/fordscholars/

Tuesday, October 1—Students pick up posters from Media Resources

Wednesday, October 2—Ford Scholars Symposium, 4-6 pm, Vassar College Alumnae House