In formulating my seminar paper- I found myself constantly shifting ideas and frameworks through which to approach.

As we have progressed through the semester, I often found myself going in depth analyzing projects not only independently, but comparatively and relationally across projects. Using the content and tools of one project to expand your knowledge or pose new framing questions in another project was not only helpful- it was fun to see how the takeaways and value of a DH project could be deepened by putting it in the context of another. Ultimately, in my seminar paper I chose to write about this relational cross-project analysis as a more formalized pedagogical practice in DH.

I chose to focus on decolonial African projects to demonstrate how helpful this approach can be. Upon reading “Decolonizing Digital Humanities: Africa in Perspective“(which JoJo recommended to me and I highly recommend), I was very interested at the position of African Digital Humanists within the space. The reading dives into, historically and now, why African academic systems are not primed for what we understand as Digital Humanities. Whether it be differing access to digital tools or the more strict and standardized academic structure that they follow (which in and of itself is actually a legacy of colonialism), the field needs to shift and expand in order to accommodate African voices. For a field that defines itself by values such as inclusivity, collaboration, and the amplification of all voices, the disparity in the volume of work being published by African Digital Humanists seems to be a failure.

The final abstract for my project was as follows:

“The importance of decolonizing pedagogy is justly emphasized within the Digital Humanities field, displayed by projects and pieces such as The Decolonial Atlas and Roopika Risam’s “Postcolonial Digital Pedagogy”. These works emphasize the importance of recognizing the history of colonialism in order to deconstruct the systemic harms. While these works are impressive and meaningful in their accomplishments, they could become more salient than they already are by being critically analyzed in a relational way to other Digital Humanities works. This seminar paper explores the idea that digital humanities discourse could be magnified by exploring the idea that all forms of injustice enforce one another by highlighting these concurrent colonialist actions throughout history. Cross-project analysis would allow Digital Humanists to pose creative and new questions, seeing projects beyond their own boundaries and expanding and overlapping with the boundaries of related works. This can be demonstrated in several ways, in the case of this paper by a geospatial cross-project analysis of The Decolonial Atlas & The Swahili Story Map, and a pedagogical analysis of educational tools from SlaveVoyages and Atlantic Black Box. Considering inclusive epistemology and knowledge production, this analytical approach to the Digital Humanities fits well within its existing practices while creating space for more expansive discovery and preservation.”

The resulting paper dove into the history of DH in Africa, as well as analyzing four decolonial African DH projects. The first analysis was a geospatial comparison of maps. The second was a pedagogical analysis of educational tools shared on two different projects. While this relational cross-project analysis method could be applied to any and all DH projects, the application to decolonial African DH felt salient, as African methodologies and voices amongst the DH community need to be put at the forefront. All in all, the paper came into itself as the research progressed and the outlining took place, and it was very different from my original concept, but outlining a formal pedagogical approach was fun and felt like a worthy exercise of the knowledge we have gained since August.

I hope that you all have a great holiday season and best of luck in the Spring!

Tonight’s GCDI Fellow workshop was very informative, with plenty of sources, tools, and projects shared that would be helpful to any new DH scholars.

Tuka started off by introducing herself, and she made it very approachable by explaining what she does. She also explained throughout the workshop which tools she uses for what she does, and mentioned other GCDI Fellows who would be helpful to contact for specific questions or assistance. Tuka isn’t a very coding-heavy DH scholar, and shared with us that she is primarily a linguist, which made learning from her perfect for a week where we will be discussing text mining/analysis.

In Tuka’s overview of Digital Humanities, it’s clear that even experienced scholars haven’t participated in all forms of DH, because there are just too many. While we stuck to seeing projects that met five forms of scholarship, there are countless more that can fall under the DH umbrella. Some of the examples that Tuka mentioned which I hadn’t been exposed to before were physical computing and app development. I know what these things are, but haven’t had the opportunity to explore them in a pedagogical context. Tuka mentioned her love, and GCDI’s love, for open source tools and data. This makes sense as we are all in a student/instructor role where accessible tools and data are likely to be the ones that we choose to use. Following our discussion in class last week, this was helpful to see how core the concept of open source is to all DH scholars.

Of the tools that we explored in the workshop, I was particularly excited by Scrapy. This open source tool allows you to, using Python, perform simple web scraping. I have only ever performed web scraping using R, so it was very helpful to see another tool and how it may compare to the R process of web scraping. Extracting data from websites can be a very exciting way to explore, and makes you see the content in a whole new way. New approaches to doing this help make the process smoother and more approachable to beginners, such as myself. For any other R users out there, they shared the link for the CUNY Commons RUG (R Users Group). This space is for R users of all levels to discuss, problem solve, and highlight their exciting work.

Tuka also reviewed Voyant, which many of us seem to have used to text mining as a Praxis assignment. We replied on an existing corpus, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which exists in the website to be analyzed. Doing this portion together as a group was helpful- despite having used Voyant myself, there was a lot to learn!

One final aspect of the workshop that stood out to me was the inclusion of the Preserve the Baltimore Uprising Archive Project. Using Omeka, this archive DH project commemorates the 2015 activist movement in Baltimore and is intended to preserve those efforts and document this historical moment in time, which continues today. I grew up in Baltimore and was there until 2016, so this movement had a massive impact on my development not only as an activist, but as a person. Seeing such a wonderful preservation of those efforts to support and stand up for the Black community following George Floyd’s murder, a group of efforts centered around pain and oppression, was incredibly special. The project has diverse perspectives and is dynamic is its inclusion of content. People can submit their own original content to be included, only with approval, and it showcases items as well as larger oral histories. Oral activism was a key part of this movement, and preserving those oral histories seems to be such a beautiful and kind way to recognize Baltimore’s heartbreak at that moment. The project includes a lesson plan for instructing oral histories to encourage active engagement with the project.

This workshop touched on a wide array of branches within DH, both in the usages of the scholarship and the tools to do so. For someone who is new to DH, I found this to make it seem approachable and exciting.

It was an amusing experience to complete the Wikipedia praxis assignment after reading the “When Wikipedia Fought Back” article, written by Will Mari. I was incredibly excited to complete this assignment as I think Wikipedia, as an online platform/encyclopedia, is a modern marvel of innovative information preservation and engineering. Prior to completing the assignment, I understood that there is a strong community of Wikipedia experts, diligently monitoring articles and citations for anything that may be out of place. This is a wonderful thing! Ensuring that only helpful and accurate information is being displayed is of the utmost importance. However, after reading Mari’s article, I found myself feeling very intimidated and nervous to make any sort of error.

The entire process of signing up, joining our course, and completing the assigned trainings was quite simple. The training materials were engaging: demonstrating the integrity and significance of the platform. The five pillars were the most significant:

• Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia
• Wikipedia has a neutral point of view
• Wikipedia is free content
• Wikipedians should interact in a respectful and civil manner
• Wikipedia does not have firm rules

However, each of these 5 seemed to come with some leniency. Much like most online platforms, it was stated that there is flexibility as sources and digital platforms continue to evolve. The following trainings were slightly more technical, how to edit articles, add citations, and so forth. Once the groundwork was laid, it was time to actually begin making a minor edit.

I dove headfirst into CitationHunt, scrolled through a whole bunch of potentially lacking statements, and could not find one with a source that felt within my reach. This amusing error message also continued to populate every few clicks:

At this point, I pivoted and thought “What’s something that I think about every day, and would like to learn a new fun fact about?”. That was when I got to thinking- Stuytown! Personal tidbit: I moved into StuyTown with a friend when I moved to NYC. He and a friend of his moved in at the peak of the pandemic, thus the rent is stabilized at a more affordable rate than I may have otherwise been able to find.

It’s also no secret that Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village has deep histories. This community was opened after WWII, and quite a few of the original residents are still here. StuyTown is commonly in housing news, most often now for stabilization debates, but once for topics such as housing segregation and ownership loan defaults. There is plenty to learn about this Manhattan community, so it seemed like the perfect topic for which I could find a fact and toss it into the Wikipedia page.

I found mention of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in a 2005 book, New York: The Movie Lover’s Guide: The Ultimate Insider Tour of Movie New York. The book mentioned a number of films and TV shows which were either shot or set in the neighborhood, as well as some of the famous residents who have lived here. I was able to find that the 1957-1958 TV show Decoy included shots of the neighborhood, which was not mentioned on the Wikipedia page. I decided that would be a nice contribution to the “In Popular Culture” portion of the article.

After completing the training materials, the process of actually making the edit was significantly easier than deciding what edit to make. I simply put the article into edit mode, made my changes, ensured that the citation was properly documented, and published.

After reading of the experience that Mari’s students had when editing their school’s page, I am very anxious to see if my minor edit stays in place, or if it will be further edited or removed. I was careful to make sure that all formatting and citing was done properly, so perhaps it will stick, but I’d find myself unsurprised if that wasn’t the case. Either way, it was very cool to engage in a platform that is so heavily trafficked and I’ve been interested in for a long while. Perhaps in the future I will brush up further on these skills and jump in on an “Edit-A-Thon”!

When reading “The September 11 Digital Archive”, written by Stephen Brier and Joshua Brown of the Graduate Center, I was initially amazed by how quickly things with this archivist project seemed to evolve. The kickoff in November was so immediate after the September attacks that it comes across that the origins of this project were innately innovative as prompted by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The immediate recognition of the need to responsibly and collectively create a multi-faceted archive demonstrates the role that digital humanists play in these spaces where, as the world was reeling from this life-altering event, they saw the importance for the future of history to document not only the event itself, but the emotional and humanistic aftermath.

Among this immediacy, there were a few other important questions/topics that this paper addressed well. The first is the preservation of digital humanities projects: how can this be done sustainably and who is responsible for doing it? Another is the question of ethical preservation of the deep islamophobia which followed September 11: should hateful sentiments be preserved, and how can this be done consciously and without inflicting further harm?

Digital humanities projects, such as this archive, are unique in that they exists solely in the digital space and could, thus, theoretically last forever in a highly accessible way. A major concern with this, however, is the constantly changing nature of the digital space. September 11 was only 3 years after the invention of Google in 1998- and the internet has not slowed down in its constant evolution since. Because of this, programs are constantly becoming outdated at an increasing rate. The ability of online spaces to continually improve and grow is boundless, however this means that much of the content in these older forms of digital archives may also be assigned the title of “outdated” simply because of the platform in which they exist. In order for an archive to remain relevant and, more importantly, accessible, it must be maintained and continually updated/improved so that it is not lost to time. That would defeat the purpose of these digital humanists seeking to preserve significant history contemporarily.

The September 11 Digital Archive is still very much in use and, when visiting the website, you can see who is now responsible for its maintenance and support. The raw nature of this archive is unique and relatively unfiltered, with its continuing growth. The ultimate question is how long will this project be maintained? Will it ever only exist in the digital space? If left with one institution for protection and maintenance, the project may be at risk of being lost to the depths of the internet, in which case, it would sadly become lost to the jumble of the modern internet.

The second major question which I found myself asking while reading this article was about the hateful sentiments which became incredibly vocal following the events of September 11. The United States in not at all unfamiliar with hateful speech and othering of institutionally oppressed groups, but this became an environment in which hateful people came to feel justified in their hate. Widespread islamophobia snowballed in the United States, with rhetorics shifting in a large-scale and terrifying way.

If I were a digital humanist, I don’t think that I would want to preserve and publish these sentiments. But, I don’t think that these humanists were facing that question. The question instead was: what is important for society and historians to recognize about this event in the future? When reframing this mindset, it is important to document this nationalist wave of islamophobia which caused additional, long-standing harm. Any record of September 11 that did not highlight this and show the hate that unfolded would not be doing the course of events justice. Regardless of the complexity, it is a thread that is central to the aftermath, even now years later.

Brier and Brown did touch on this right at the end of the reading, stating that is is exactly these problematic complexities paint the clearest image of the events. They describe much of the material submitted to the project as “riddled with jingoistic, racist, xenophobic, and messianic attitudes and opinions.” While this would make it difficult to put even further into the public memory, that is exactly why it needs to be there.

I found that the reading surrounding this project was very informative, as well as a strong demonstration of just why these digital humanities projects are so important to modern history. The digitization of archiving and preserving history in real time allows us to capture much larger and clearer images, but being conscious of what we preserve and how we do it is of the utmost importance.

As someone who has been focusing on data analysis for the past years, professionally and academically, I always find myself re-centering around the lens of ethical data collection and use. Simply because a data set is interesting or may hold new findings does not mean that said data ethical or that you are the correct individual to be using said data.

This was a strong undertone of Jennifer Guiliano and Caroline Heitman’s article, “Difficult Heritage and the Complexities of Indigenous Data”. As scholarship and the empirical space embrace the importance and historical neglect of indigenous populations after centuries of colonialism and erasure, it is important to keep in mind that when trying to research indigenous histories, the line between highlighting colonialism and perpetuating it is incredibly thin. Guiliano and Heitman did an excellent job of displaying how these practices are continued today in the, maybe well intended, but absolutely harmful, non-indigenous preservation efforts. While the violence, genocide, disease-spreading, and overall abhorrent practices of colonialism have done irreparable harm, so have these ill-advised 20th century preservation efforts.

The digitization of indigenous data without mindful consideration of how this preserves harmful practices lays the foundations for continuous harm. When this data is collected, manipulated, and digitized by non-indigenous peoples for their own use, the perspective and usage of such data continues to be centered around colonialism.

Interestingly, this creates a worthy intersection with some of the points made by Lev Manovich in “What is Visualization?”. It is in this article that Manovich lays out how data reduction methods are not only outdated given our modern digitization technologies, reduction is somewhat a means of erasure for the complexities of large data sets. It is in this unneeded erasure that nuance and value are lost from meaningful data.

The intersection of these articles makes a clear point regarding data practices, namely in the digitization and use of Indigenous data, but perhaps also creates a lens that should be applied to all data practices. Not only should researchers be questioning “should I research this?”, but also need to question “am I the right person to be researching this?”. Digital humanists hold a lot of power in the presentation of their findings, and with that comes the ethical requirement to question whether their research and practices being used to complete it is undoing harm or preserving it.

Engaging in the text mining praxis assignment was very interesting as I haven’t ever actually initiated a text mining project. Working with large volumes of text can be tedious, but the importance of the contents of passages deserve adequate analysis, which text mining programs are useful for.

The introductory materials to the assignment, Getting Started with Text Mining, was a helpful overview which explained not only what text mining is, but why it matters and the basics of how it can be done. Transforming text to data can be a fun process, and the programs make it accessible to first time text miners, such as myself. As a student who work largely in statistical analysis of large data sets, it was cool to see the statement “Getting your data to look nice takes FAR LONGER than you want it to, than you think it should, than you think it deserves to. It is arguably the most difficult and crucial part of the process.” This is something that I have always had to remind myself when going through the data cleaning process: it is tedious and laborious, but absolutely essential.

After playing around with a few of the programs, I jumped into Voyant, as this seemed to be the most approachable. The text that I chose was a publication by Corina Boar and Simon Mongey, “Dynamic trade-offs and labor supply under the CARES Act”, published in August of 2020. This publication explores a statistical analysis of the impact of the CARES Act on workers tendency to return to work after being furloughed or laid off at the outset of the pandemic. After a few analyses, the researchers found that the CARES act, in a dynamic model rather than a static one, did not have a causational relationship with workers not returning to the labor force. There were a number of reasons for this, if you have interest I highly recommend looking it over here.

The outcomes were interesting, and it took a bit to digest the output of the Voyant program as a first time user. The dashboard looked like this:

The dashboard is highly colorful and includes a lot of information that is useful for analyzing the text. The text was given a readability index of 10.978 and a vocabulary density of 0.187. The two aspects of the dashboard that I found most interesting to toy with were the Cirrus, which is a word cloud highlighting the density of terms in the text, and the frequency chart, displaying a similar bit of information in a more interactive and more quantitatively-presenting way (images below).

This was a rather dense article I have been working through to analyze the economic impacts of the CARES Act, and this text mining tool was helpful in presenting data which showed the importance of topics within the paper. Playing around with the tools showed a new way of analyzing texts which I was previously unfamiliar with and was glad to be exposed to.

When exploring these projects, it is clear that they are mindfully cultivated and maintained with the issues discussed in our readings at the forefront. As is always important, the lens that these projects are published through is mindfully accounting for issues that are institutionally central not only to Digital Humanities or academia, but the world as a whole. While they do not all explicitly address each issue discussed, as the range is so broad, they account for what is relevant. They also exemplify how expansive the field can be, with each of them being unique and more narrowly focused, but accounting for a broader representation of the subject matter.

I found the Colored Conventions Project site to be incredibly conscious, addressing a wide range of these issues. Not only has their team done significantly meaningful work since the project was launched in 2012, they seem to have done so in a way that pays homage to the root of their research in a modern way. The statement of their principles on the site shows this clearly. The first principle is to collaboratively enact principles and values modeled by the corresponding movement. This alone highlights the defining collaborative nature of Digital Humanities, and its reliance on values as a basis for academic expansion. The next two principles display immense respect for humans, namely Black women and Black people as a whole. The centrality of reverence for these communities defines the tone with which the project is completed. Amongst the trivialization of feminist methodologies, as highlighted by Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh, and the need to properly credit Black communities in ways that have previously been intentionally overlook in academia, as shared by Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam, these values are uplifting to see held closely. The remaining two principles named support labor rights and the role of Black people as data creators, while acknowledging the harm that has been imparted on the community historically by means of weaponized data.

In the context of the larger project, these principles acting as pillars paint an image of how important the issues are to digital humanists. At its core, this redefines Digital Humanities as a field in which previously othered/oppressed academics have a space to expand upon their work in a way that continues in spite of the current and historical boundaries.

Amongst the exhibits and conventions, which seem to have a deeply collaborative nature, this project also labels Digital Humanities as innately pedagogical. The teaching portion of the project encourages continual expansion and impression by those who have interest in the work and wish to teach or learn the content. I found all of the projects to show similar foundations, but the Colored Conventions Project is a clear exhibition of respect and collaboration amongst digital humanists which I think makes a larger statement about the field and it’s ineffable nature.