Previously, I have helped with sections of proposals for company projects, usually as supporting research or collecting information about partnerships or collaborators. The experience of needing to propose a justifiable project and theoretically sell why it should happen, and how one might go about doing it, was an enlightening experience. I found the ideation process challenging, making sure that it fit into the context of the class and the Digital Humanities. I am personally not a fan of needing to suggest a project on my own, so trying to evaluate the usefulness of a project idea proved to be the first and most daunting challenge. After finalizing an idea (many were abandoned) I found following the Digital Humanities Research Institute Project Lab helpful in thinking through the proposal. The National Endowment for the Humanities articles were also helpful, but I realized it was making my experience more complicated and I needed to focus on what would be feasible for a semester-long project. Keeping in mind the time scale helped me narrow down the scope after receiving the in class feedback. I had not done many field scans before this and found it to be difficult, but also vital. First, I was just impressed by a lot of what I found, but also it was great to break down the components I felt were like what I would write about in the proposal and where I felt my proposed project could diverge.

Going forward, I would probably continue to use the Digital Humanities Research Institute Project Lab when working through a project. I found the experience of drafting a project proposal to be a great skill to add to my toolset. I also have a deeper understanding of the less glamorous side of developing something and have immense appreciation for the team members who are responsible for drafting proposals to get funding for projects and initiatives.

There were a few articles from the social media week that were not discussed in class as much as “A Life Lived in Media”. 

Three of the readings dealt with Blackness and the Digital space. Interacting with academic writing and research about Blackness is unfamiliar, but incredibly affirming. The piece Signifying Shade as We #RaceTogether Drinking Our #NewStarbucksDrink “White Privilege Americana Extra Whip” was refreshing and called out the co-opting of culture by corporations in a way that felt qualitatively impactful. Within the last year, I realized there were large portions of my LGBTQ+ knowledge that had been sanitized through corporate intervention. The way I understood certain cultural actions and language to just be of my generation was largely extracted from this community. This was starkly felt after watching Paris Is Burning and having a better context for where certain terms of endearment and evaluation came from. Seeing that extraction of Black communication online for marketing strategy as a serious point of research was fascinating. I am familiar with using Twitter (also sometimes called X) as a litmus for a portion of the public’s opinion, but the way author Toniesha L. Taylor describes scraping Twitter hashtags, and running it through tools like Voyant to find meaning or a trend was illuminating. 

The reading “Is Twitter Any Place for a [Black Academic] Lady?” was a bit of a frustrating read. As grateful as I am that academics and researchers like Marcia Chatelain share publicly, there are certainly times when I wish women of color did not bother. Seeing the vitriol and harassment they receive online for stating an opinion or sharing information is such a disheartening experience. The piece gave me a better understanding of some contentions academics who decide to do work in the public encounter. Where I felt that Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University is a great guideline and food for thought on “public academics”, Chatelain gives a realistic anecdote of just why it is so difficult to have these two worlds meet, and with a intersectional lens. The rigid understanding of research and the limited space for outreach seems like a worthy place for evaluating our higher education systems. Individual academics should not feel that their cultural work is not valuable or that it can directly diminish their academic value to the institutions they work for. While I have limited understanding of all facets of how the academic landscape works, it seems folks are yearning for sustainable, paying options besides tenure or perhaps reevaluating the criteria for it.

One portion that was impactful in the piece was the perception of teaching. That being a good teacher, one student remembers and appreciates, works against being a scholar. Our crisis in K-12 teachers feels like a direct implication of this devaluing of teaching. I’m not sure what needs to happen to culturally shift this perception, but academics as a whole suffers from that rigidity. 

Having Amanda Licastro come and speak for the pedagogy week was a perfect expansion of that week’s readings. Frankly, doing social annotations was a stressful activity for me. Forming something useful to add to a conversation digitally comes less natural for me and having my thoughts memorialized is the thing intrusive thoughts feed on. That being said, after reading “Breaking Boundaries With Social Annotation: An Interview With Amanda Licastro” and having her discuss the affordances around using social annotation in coursework, I wish it were implemented more often in K-12 settings. Having students get used to engaging in constructive discourse around a shared piece of media is a usual skill and might make traversing social media and other digital public spaces an overall better experience. I have read a lot about media literacy and I think techniques and methods like social annotation should probably enter these conversations more in how we teach students to engage and conduct themselves online.

I also thought the insights instructors can gleam from what students discuss in this format is such a great way to get data on how the media for class is being received and perhaps make real time adjustments easier.

While I heed and agree with the concerns Monica Brown and Benjamin Croft raise in “Social Annotation and an Inclusive Praxis for Open Pedagogy in the College Classroom”, especially regarding power and microaggressions in the online space, the promise of this tool seems like something we should encourage. I think about the ways students can be made to feel they have little control of lessons and how using open pedagogy and social annotations can validate their knowledge creation and allow them to feel agency in the classroom. 

For the Text Analysis Praxis, I decided to use Voyant to look at Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice by Katerina Cizek, William Uricchio, and 12 other authors. Initially, I was searching MIT Press Open for a text that might be interesting and happened to run across the digital version of Collective Wisdom, which I already had the physical copy of, but have not read yet. My thought was, “I suppose I can do a ‘distant’ read before the ‘close’ read.

First, I filtered out the basic frequent terms, so that the Cirrus view would yield more useful results to inspect. They were what I expected given that the book’s subject matter. The most frequent words in the corpus being media (566); creation (524); new (432); film (378); and project (346). Other terms that I singled out to look more into were community, systems, documentary, journalism, and ai.

I toggled through some of the corpus and visualization tools. Speaking strictly on sheer fascination, the Bubbles tool was  amusing. I decided to leave the sound on too while the system cycled through the frequencies of the terms in the document. The links view was also of interest. Network displays of information are helpful when looking at correlations and relationships.

The context tool was helpful in exploring some of the terms that were also frequently used. Since the book has about 13 authors, I was curious if I would be able to identify the varied usage of certain terms. I saw this clearly when looking at community. At times the term was used in the first person, like belonging through personal heritage and others were more institution-based. There were instances that were observations or criticisms from outside of a community or against a particular community.

Other terms I investigated were:

Ai: I was glad to see it was largely referencing artists who were trying to utilize AI in their practice or attention to its harms where people of color are concerned.

Journalism: The context I pulled out was collaborative or co-creative use of journalism. In another class, I’ve become more familiar with data journalism and was interested to see how it may be used in the text.

Initially, I was concerned that I should have chosen a more meaningful topic for this assignment, but the 6th entry of the Data-Sitters Club, Voyant’s Big Day, reminded me that the text and reason for exploration don’t have to be profound. As a fan of the Baby-Sitters Club, I found this project to be a delightful surprise. Using Voyant to explore the series never crossed my mind. The questions that the post author, Katherine Bowers, mentions are a useful starting point when attempting a text mining project:

“Is close or distant reading the best approach for the questions you have?”

“Is the corpus complete? What are the characteristics of the corpus? What’s missing?”

“How does the data skew? What’s skewing the data?”

If I could create a manageable dataset for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, I would explore it like the Data Sitters Club did. For now, I am curious if my ‘distant’ then ‘close’ read will have any significant impact on my experience with Collective Wisdom.

I attended GCDI’s Confessions or a Digital Hoarder workshop on October 12th. I was interested to hear from an academic side what challenges can arise when trying to maintain digital content.

The workshop was run by Digital Fellow Leanne Fan and started off covering the services that GCDI offers and how to go about accessing them.

Leanne started us off with some vocabulary, which I thought was helpful for determining where you may stand in the matrix of digital hoarding. Before this workshop, I had not considered a nuanced breakdown of digital hoarding, but leading with introductory language for defining the different ways we hoard digital content was a great starting point. My current struggles present with constant acquisition (“Constant gathering of digital content, without much consideration of its value, purpose or utility.”). I’d like to believe I exercise a certain level of discernment when screen-grabbing or bookmarking certain content, but I can recount many occasions where I couldn’t fathom why I’d saved a piece of content. There are also different digital hoarding types, I identify with anxiety driven. My present self strongly believes that “yes, I could totally use this information in the future”. My future self… doesn’t always agree, but in some ways, I can’t shake that it’s better to save whatever the content is just in case.

One of the more interesting perspectives that surfaced during the workshop was the various ways digital hoarding costs us. Leanne gave some concrete costs, like environmental. Particularly salient was the attention to the mental cost. Another Digital Fellow, Silvia, shared a link that discusses the mental health cost of digital hoarding. She emphasized that our digital acquisition could have a strong influence on our mental health, even though it is technically virtual. And I felt that deeply, as I have lost numerous hours searching multiple browser history or download logs seeking what I’ve lost. I feel anxious about losing important things and frustrated with myself for not managing my data better.

The workshop shared some tips or tools (and attendees shared what they do or use anecdotally). This file naming and organizing structure was mentioned and seems like it could be useful for keeping track of content. I was particularly interested in this link for comparing notating apps. I am currently using Notion, txt files, and paper journals, but it’s been hard to find a good note-taking rhythm now that my course readings are primarily digital.

It would be great to see a future version of this workshop with more focus on challenges more specific to digital hoarding in the academic space. More demonstration on how to mitigate the hinderances it might pose to getting papers and projects done would also be great to see.

For the praxis visualization assignment, I explored a rock music list a friend gave me. It was shared as an excel file, so exporting as a CSV for Tableau and Palladio was made simple. The list includes music artists, specific song(s) from that artist, the genre(s) for the song, and the year the song was released.

Palladio

After loading the data in, I could experiment with the map, graph, table, and gallery views. Map view wasn’t useful as I do not have location data in this data set and table view mirrors what I have already done with this list in Notion. The graph view was the most useful for seeing the data in a different light. I used artist as the source and genre, song, and year as the targets. Each time, the changes in relations between the information surprised me. The first time I used this list, I just started listening based on the order in the excel file. With the graph view, I was experiencing the data as a journey; listening to a particular song by an artist and then another because of the relation they share by genre or year released. Overall, this was the most appealing visualization between the two platforms I applied my dataset to.

Tableau

Previously, I tried this dataset out last week by attempting to add country tags for each artist and create a map with it. I found that the list skewed heavily towards the UK and the USA. I didn’t continue down this route for that reason and there are like 300 or 400 entries that would need to have a location added. Even though it didn’t work out with making a map, I wanted to try the dataset again to see if I could still get some insight (and get more experience with Tableau). I watched some tutorials to better understand how adding dimensions and measures would affect a visualization.

I made three worksheets. The first is a look at the artist by year. This view didn’t tell me much and because there was an abundance of artists included, it just felt like an endless scroll. The second worksheet was a look at entry count by year. This highlighted a heavy concentration in the 1960-1980s. The third view was the frequency that an artist appeared in the list overall. I think the last two views were the most illuminating.

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/maci.morris/vizzes

Using the dataset in Tableau was a more outwardly analytical experience. I am looking forward to discussing the list with my friend. Some questions I have are: what was his methodology for compiling this list, and did he realize that there was a favoring of Western countries? I was wondering about the term “Intro” in this context. He named the list “Intro to Rock” and I wonder if his interpretation of intro means that it should start at what we believe to be the origins in time for rock. “Difficult Heritage and the Complexities of Indigenous Data” and “A Review of ‘Two Plantations” were most impactful in giving me examples of colonial impact in data and data representation, and what it could look to collect and present data more ethically. As I was working on this, I noticed more immediately than I would have previously that the list is more male centric and favors Western artists. As a list between friends I don’t feel it’s a huge issue, but I am reminded of the numerous times I’ve encountered recommendation list for popular media. The lists often reflect this same issue of representation, where cultural “best of“ is concerned.

This post will examine how the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, Colored Conventions, and Reviews in Digital Humanities reflect issues discussed in our readings.

Early Caribbean Digital Archive lays out clearly their goals: to make literary works from the Caribbean and other related groups digitally accessible and to provide means to decolonize these works. In Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, there is an emphasis on decentering Western knowledge standards and procedures to value and evaluate DH works from Global South practitioners. There is an acknowledgement that many existing archives are built with colonial practices, but envision digital archives that remap what is perceived as “non-knowledge”. The ECDA values the practice of “remix” which highlights the stories of marginalized people through digital means and gives their narratives equal standing with those of European Colonial authors. Equally important is the intentionality in providing and curating resources for pedagogical means. Growing the DH field and solidifying its legitimacy requires creating entry points for engagement in ways that are tailored to different academic settings.

Through their commitment to open access and offering/developing pedagogical tool, DCDA and Colored Conventions can work to address one of the issues laid out in Digital Black Atlantic. Two of the structural issues detailed in acquiring enough participation from Digital Humanities scholars of color was the lack of access in these communities to STEM scholarship and lack of peer reviews who have a deep understanding of the intersections of the African Diaspora and digital studies. Through their offerings, projects like these might help to cultivate the very peers that can be difficult to garner.

Lack of access to peers to contribute to larger bodies of research from the Global South was also mentioned in Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, as the authors felt they were not successful in acquiring the number of contributions they had hoped from a range of languages, perspectives, and research approaches. In both the projects mentioned in this post and the paper itself, decolonization of knowledge and knowledge standards will be paramount in growing the diversity of DH.

In Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh explain that there is a lack of exploration in DH with human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, and media studies. While perusing the projects in Reviews in Digital Humanities, this was salient when searching through field of study or by topic or method. Spending more time with other repositories for DH projects would help me understand this issue more. Starting questions: How does the editorial process impact particular types of submissions? What interventions are already in place to broaden these intersections? How are calls for submitting to DH publications promoted?