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!

Since I came to New York City, I have always been interested in housing rights, housing justice, and homelessness issues.  I guess this is related to my personal experiences: 1) the tedious rental processes I have been through many times; 2) the NYC civil court experience regarding a broker’s rental scheme. (Even though I won and got the Notice of Judgment from the court, I eventually failed to get my money back.); and 3) working experience for a real estate investment company and understanding the concept of the term “air rights.” (This is a counter-example to Locke’s philosophical argument about private property from nature by working on it.) All three experiences I listed above had not been my concern before, but here in NYC, the fact that I care about housing rights means that I am in a relatively vulnerable position as a tenant. The context where I stand impacts how I compose perspectives on a certain matter.

This idea for the final project, the Evicted Voices, comes from first-hand experience. First, I always pass through the Queensbridge Houses on my way home and witness the serious living conditions of the neighborhood all the time. Secondly, the idea came to me while doing mapping praxis for the class. I browsed NYC websites to collect data for the praxis assignment and visited the Mapping Equity project site. The site is accessible and provides a useful tool to compare various factors, but it lacks what I see in Queensbridge Houses: the streets, people’s looks, and the landscapes of the neighborhood. Therefore, the main purpose of the project is to fill the gap between data with unique voices and vivid stories of the people.

By researching related projects, such as Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, JustFix, and New Destiny Housing, I can refine the approaches and narrow down the scope of the project. First, I wanted to provide a philosophical basis for the project through which people can form a bond of sympathy and solidarity; thus, I came up with Levinas’ philosophical notion, the face of the Other. I thought his philosophy could function as a solid foundation for the project and also as an encouraging base for people’s participation. Most importantly, I think the project must belong to the people of Queensbridge Houses and be an open sphere where they gather their voices and step forward into collective action.

Writing and proposing a DH project is still an unfamiliar process, but I am sure what I struggle with now will impact how I approach a new field, DH.

Hannah Arendt poignantly wrote that understanding how antisemitism led to the rather unimpeded Holocaust, cannot “be fully explained and grasped” nonetheless, she and numerous historians have tried, including David Nirenberg who states that we must trace [the] origins and track how certain members of society were excluded, expelled and/or executed based on their religion and/or race. Through my ‘close reading’ of the history of the evolution of antisemitism, and its role in this part of the historiography of the Holocaust, in conjunction (or in collaboration) with the ‘distant reading’ of several innovative digital humanities (‘DH’) projects, I will demonstrate how DH scholars (‘digital humanists’) help historians investigate vast troves of digitized materials, to confirm, clarify, contradict, uncover new and/or under-researched historical information that was previously beyond reach for an individual’s close reading, for a more accurate and/or comprehensive historiography. In this paper, I will “oscillate between close and distant reading,” with its digital text and discourse analysis, in researching antisemitism in the late 19th century and early 20th century, where historians state that it has evolved from anti-Judaism to modern antisemitism or from a theological anti-Judaism to a modern, racial antisemitism.

The textual analysis available through Digital Humanities tools may have been criticized in the past, but this should no longer be an issue given that for history and historians in particular, “traces of the past are also embedded in the visual— photographs, paintings, sketches—and material culture [and thus, t]he proliferation of digitized visual sources[,] presents historians with exciting new technical and theoretical problems and opportunities,” which we’ll see later in this paper. Initially, digital innovations in the field of history were regarded with some skepticism and a debate existed among historians whether “Digital History” was just a research tool or whether it should be considered a separate academic field. Digital Humanities is that field, and there are scholars considered experts in both history and Digital Humanities. I’d like to say that my role in authoring this paper is one of a “project manager” of sorts.

Historians mustn’t worry that their intellectual studies will be replaced with big data or that digital methodologies will replace intelligent inquiry. Digital methodologies are neither alternatives to historical theories nor are they significant outside of the historical framework. Many scholars still use their expertise to explore and extract information manually, thus focusing on what they consider important. Nonetheless, digital humanities tools and methodologies, such as the ones that I will be highlighting in this paper, are accessible and demonstrate how the work of historians can be enhanced and can also present nuances, patterns and/or under researched datapoints that may be overlooked or not available with close reading. Digital humanities can support historians to research digital archives and repositories and digital humanists are able to extrapolate patterns in big data, which isn’t possible by browsing or by using a sampling method. Big data sets may have not been accessible in the past, but as the result of the digitization of countless archives of World War II history, and the historiography of the Holocaust in particular, over the last twenty years or so, and through the efforts of digital humanists (aka digital humanities researchers or scholars), “corpora available for historical research that are simply too large to be examined in their entirety and to be perused manually,” are now accessible. Doubts of historians being replaced by digital humanities, have by now most likely been put aside.

There’s enough work to go around for both the historians and digital humanists, which is what we’re about to learn from the digital humanities authors of “Representation of Jews and Anti-Jewish Bias in 19th Century French Public Discourse: Distant and Close Reading,” Writing the digital history of Nazi Germany, and “Big Data for Global History: The Transformative Promise of Digital Humanities.” These authors employ digital solutions to present and disseminate historiographical sources, based on historians’ scholarship on antisemitism, Nazi Germany, and racial theory, respectively. The examples I cite in this paper attest to the benefits of using digital methods when dealing with digital sources and archives, and thus with big data sets.¹⁰ Technological tools, including commercial platform solutions can be deployed to disseminate historical metadata, which can help expand our knowledge about this history. Digital methods of mapping, text analysis and visualization can provide what close reading and browsing, which until recently was common practice, can’t achieve.⁹ For instance, the list of digitized collections of Holocaust studies in the Library of Congress alone are immense and it would take several lifetimes for any historian to examine the contents in the digitized. Indeed, some historians have recognized since at least the 1970s that there are digitized archives available for historical research that are simply too large to be examined in their entirety and to be perused manually.

Historians are “anchored in the premise that language and language use are [fundamental] for historical, political, and social realities.” As such, historical semantics, the linguistic production of meaning, is essential for studying the evolution of antisemitism. The DH studies under review, illustrate how the history of discourse can benefit from digital humanities methodologies; namely, digitized archive materials created with machine learning through “the lens of distant reading.” The datasets of these studies, were transcribed using Computer Vision (CV) technology, which use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to “access, process, analyze, and understand visual information.” For decades now, the digitization of printed materials via optical character recognition (OCR) have allowed a reader to browse and/or read books deeply (close reading), but OCR has also enabled distant reading, the term coined by Franco Moretti. Franco Moretti wrote in “Distant Reading” that since humans have limitations in their ability to close read (Moretti 2000), distant reading can alleviate a close reader’s limitations. For example, in “From Distant to Public Reading,” it was calculated, that if person were to only read all the English novels published in 2000, at a pace of 200 words per minute, it would take approximately 80 years – without any interruptions, including sleeping and eating! Conventional sampling methods of text or “pre-defined corpora,” to some extent, address the challenge of big data in that they reduce the amount of data to manageable proportions or to what is deemed relevant. Digital humanists or historians, in scrutinizing, selecting and thus determining what is significant, during the close reading process or digital humanities methodologies (i.e., translation tool and tag clouds generated by Voyant), can then tailor a DH linguistic analysis, which can then add “the reader’s interpretive sensitivity to the picture.” The digital humanists work cited in paper, reflect several ways of examining digitized archival material, which in the context of this research has provided a broader understanding of this part of the historiography of the Holocaust.

In this paper, the text analysis of three separate corpora covering specific time periods were created and used to examine text extracts of the French, German and Dutch languages from published books, periodicals, and/or newspapers in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. In each scenario, an analysis on the topics, related to antisemitism and its central theme in Holocaust studies, are compared to the close reading I provide for the historical perspective, where I set the scene like a dramaturg does in a Playbill – giving the audience an idea of the political and cultural environment in the timeframe of when the play or opera was written (I’m thinking of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Nabucco as I write this, which I believe fits the antisemitic narrative). Each dataset selected by these DH researchers is considered large and although size is not the only problem having been considered by these researchers, it can be an obstacle. Another concern is the “conceptual problem [of] reading (or, unreading) …through the lenses of others, has the potential to miss direct contact with the text itself.” In other words, the close reader is not completely removed from the machine-learning algorithms, or “the human is not removed from humanities.’

The Final Project offered an opportunity to apply theories and explored subjects discussed this semester. As I worked, I broke it into two parts: there was the DH project and the project proposal.

DH Project: The eBay Fashion Exhibit

After the data visualization praxes, I knew I wanted to explore vintage or secondhand ecommerce platforms in more depth. I thought I was interested in internet research and digital cultures, and some of the casual observations I made about how the listings were written and how that data could be presented visually solidified that notion. I bookmarked them as ideas to revisit.

Finding related projects helped refine my idea to reimagine content from eBay listings. Tega Brain’s Post The Met and the #exstrange project served as examples of how to decontextualize these digital artifacts to ask questions about digital platforms and cultural authority. From there, it became much easier to identify a theoretical framework. David Nieborg and Thomas Poell’s article, The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity articulated how to analyze the phenomenon of platformization in cultural industries (2018). Using their examination of news and gaming industries as case studies, I could better articulate how market forces, governance, and infrastructures at play impacted the vintage fashion item as a cultural commodity.

Project Proposal

Knowing grant writing takes a very specific form, I was nervous about how to approach the proposal. I had never written one before, and at first I found it difficult to know how the work I did to formulate the project and ground it theoretically contributed to the proposal. I sought examples of successfully funded grant applications to better understand what to include and how to do so. Eventually, I understand how to articulate the project’s purpose and activities.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the process of creating and proposing a DH project, even though at the beginning, I just wanted to build.

The Tools of Digital Humanities, hosted by the Digital Fellows at the GC, laid out a few of the important tools that one might use in the field. An important aspect of the tools that were shown was the concept of open-source tools. That means anyone can use them but also build upon the tool as needed.

Tuka Al Salhani led the workshop, and although her primary course of study was not Digital Humanities, and she is a linguist, she was able to call upon the tools for her field of study. This, I believe, speaks to the importance of Digital Humanist Tools as we know them and the expansion of the digital world. Tuka also went over some of the key tenets of DH and focused on five primary ones. They included Digital Pedagogy, Data Visualization, Geospatial Mapping Research, Digital Archives, and Digital Publishing. Through this workshop, there were two main goals: to consider what makes something DH and to explore the tools and research that evoke DH.

I appreciated the walkthrough of various tools, such as Voyant for textual analysis and Audacity for audiovisual editing, which is something I could have used for. Understanding the tools we even use in class, such as Manifold, and the purposes of the tools to help understand them in a new way. Tuka went over some of the ‘Things to do with DH’ and how the work we do can inform the projects we create.

I found the reading “Difficult Heritage and the Complexities of Indigenous Data” particularly interesting in light of articles both for and against the use of AI in preserving languages.

In an opinion piece on the Washington Post, Viorica Marian states that languages are being extinguished at a rate of about nine per year. And the stakes are high, she notes:
“Crucially, this is about much more than language. If a majority of languages die in the space of a few generations, that will also bring about a collapse of ways of thinking and being. Because the interaction between language and the mind is bidirectional.”

Large language models like ChatGPT pose an existential dilemma for minority languages, promising both conservation while also posing tremendous risk. In an article for Popular Mechanics, Luke Ottenhof raises the question of whether these AI projects being done for minority language communities or simply on them?

What’s clear is that these initiatives require extreme care, consideration, and collaboration with native speakers. Data is power, and therefore how it’s collected, presented, and leveraged can either empower or further marginalize already vulnerable groups. Any use of AI to preserve languages must balance urgency with a commitment to minimizing potential biases and framing effects.

The “Difficult Heritage and the Complexities of Indigenous Data” reading points to some of the challenges of working with indigenous data including context for access or the ambiguity in the process of translation. The authors argue that the only path forward is “the only path forward is through slow, thoughtful, inclusive, and collaborative practices that recognize and privilege indigenous-centric research practices and ways of knowing.”

I’m left wondering how to strike that delicate balance. These systems embed the values and viewpoints of those building them. Invasive, rushed, or careless data collection could irreversibly eradicate the nuances that make each language unique. But acting too cautiously could mean losing the chance to record native speakers entirely.

During my time living in South Korea, I witnessed shifting perceptions towards dialects. Modernization had spurred the standardization of the Korean language decades prior, privileging the Seoul dialect. By the time I arrived, efforts were being made to revitalize regional dialects through classroom education. However, these moves felt too little, too late – the biases towards the standardized Seoul dialect were deeply ingrained after years of structural marginalization. Minority dialects still faced shame and stigma, their speakers viewed as unsophisticated. This example highlights the need to consider the long-term impacts of language preservation efforts, not just their urgency. Standardizing or digitally capturing languages can embed biases that might become impossible to reverse.

https://theconversation.com/indigenous-knowledges-informing-machine-learning-could-prevent-stolen-art-and-other-culturally-unsafe-ai-practices-210625

https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a45521181/will-artificial-intelligence-save-native-languages/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/19/ai-chatgpt-language-extinction/

Data Galaxy, a startup seeking to tackle the issue of data governance in large companies, recently held a workshop on best practices in this emerging field. As organizations create, purchase, and make decisions based on more data than ever before, proper governance of that data is critical for success.

Data governance refers to the overall management and oversight of data in a company to ensure quality, security, and compliance with regulations. For modern data-driven organizations, a strong governance program can help with:

• Increased reliability and quality: with reliable governance protocols in place, teams can trust that data is clean, accurate, and standardized across systems. Crucial for analytics and decision making.
• Enhanced security and compliance: comprehensive governance helps safeguard sensitive data from unauthorized access or theft. Also ensures privacy regulations are met.
• Better decision making: with governance maximizing data quality and access, leaders can feel more confident basing strategic choices on available data.

While the workshop was focused on the corporate context, I saw opportunities to apply these practices more broadly across sectors. The corporate priorities around efficiency and growth are distinct from the aims of academic digital humanities projects, i.e. Indigenous cultures in Difficult Heritage and the Complexities of Indigenous Data.” In the latter governance not only ensures data quality, but also upholds ethical research standards and community participation in decisions. There is divergence in both the goals and stakes. However, the workshop spurred consideration about how data governance programs could aid industries – both corporate and academic – if tailored appropriately to the context.

It also led me to consider how data best practices could produce reciprocal benefit if documented and shared across industries. Corporations could adopt more thoughtful community and ethical models for data collection. Meanwhile, academics could learn from efficient private sector data management to improve conservation and access. Overall, governance remains crucial wherever data informs important decisions – but its practice may differ across industries. By learning from each other, better standards can emerge sector-wide.

Two out of the three workshops I attended this semester were the “Intro To Python” two-part series hosted by GC Digital Initiatives. As someone whose only coding experience was a 10-week long Intro to Python course that I took as an undergraduate about 4 years ago, I thought this was a great way to refresh my understanding of Python code. I think now that I have access to AI tools like ChatGPT that can write pieces of code for me, I’m more interested in just being able to read and understand the code as opposed to mastering the art of writing it myself completely. This workshop definitely helped me with that since I had forgotten a lot of the basics in these 4 years. I also hear often that Python is the easiest to understand programming language and/or the easiest to learn so I’m glad that this is the resource made available to students at the GC who want to learn how to get started with coding. I’m still learning about all of the things that I can build using Python code / what uses it can have in my life. I think that’s something that wasn’t necessarily covered in these two workshops but it would be nice to see a more intermediate workshop on that in the future, or even one that specifically shows us how to use AI to write code for us.

For example, I recently have been using ChatGPT to start building something that can help me practice and continue learning P’urhépecha, my ancestral Indigenous Mexican language. It’s a language that isn’t available on any of the popular online language learning programs / apps and all that students like myself really have to work with is lists of words with their Spanish translations that we can find online or obtain from P’urhepecha community members who teach the language. I’ve mostly been relying on making Quizlet flashcards from these lists of words but it can be very time consuming, even with the new AI feature that can turn digital notes into flashcards. I started using ChatGPT to write Python code that will allow me to skip a lot of the tedious work of gathering all of the information I have about different P’urhepecha words into a usable spreadsheet that I can later use to code different types interactive features such as flashcards, quizzes, and learning games. I liked the “Learn” feature on Quizlet that already has similar features to what I’m looking for but I didn’t like the actual making of the flashcard sets and the way those flashcards hold information is limited to a “front” and “back” (two variables) when I could use a lot more variables to make a more dynamic quizzing features and more effective learning process. If anyone knows of any resources that can help me continue this project please let me know, thanks!

I attended a two-part workshop titled “Spatial Analysis in Critical Praxis,” hosted by the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon) — a community of researchers and educators focused on applying DH to the field of ethnic studies. (DEFCon initially organized around the production of The Digital Black Atlantic, the intro to which we read this semester.) This was an intensive, hands-on workshop, limited to a small number of participants (~12). In total, we had 6 hours together, which gave us plenty of time for both theoretical discussion and tool-based practice.

Broadly, the workshop homed in on the idea of using mapping tools (i.e., GIS) to analyze social datasets and ultimately drive societal change. This is where the “critical praxis” part comes in — the teachings were grounded in a theory of praxis (from Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed) that directly links evaluation or analysis of trends to concrete action. This was framed around the following research questions: 

Accordingly, we weren’t just there to learn how to use GIS tools, but rather to think critically about how we use them, and to what ends. 

Furthermore, we went a step beyond simple cartography to actually conduct spatial analysis, which joins the visual field of mapping with humanities/social sciences-led analysis of the relationships between peoples and social/environmental systems. One way to think about this is with the following frame: “There’s something bad happening. How does that relate to the people I care about?” Spatial analysis draws a line between the phenomenon and the affected population.

In the second half of the workshop, we dove into 2 GIS tools in particular: ArcGIS and Felt. A bit about each:

• ArcGIS is the industry standard, developed by Esri in the ‘90s — it’s incredibly powerful, but also far from user-friendly. It can also be prohibitively expensive (in the thousands of dollars annually), though you may be able to access it through your institution. ArcGIS has an online version of the platform, which is what we used in the workshop. The benefit to ArcGIS Online is that it’s more streamlined, cloud-based, and functions regardless of operating system (ArcGIS Pro, on the other hand, only works on Windows).
• Felt is a relatively new tool that is free (for now) and available only as a browser-based interface. Its interface follows in the footsteps of collaborative tools like Google Docs or Figma, making it easy to work with teammates on a map in real time. Compared to ArcGIS, it’s much easier to learn the basics and get started quickly. However, because of its focus on ease of use, it can be difficult to do more advanced operations. Also, given the product is only a year or two old, it might lack some of the extensive options that other GIS tools offer.

In our workshop, we played around with multiple publicly available datasets, including one from the EPA on sources of pollution, and one from the US census (the American Community Survey). We were able to join these together and ultimately reveal trends in how areas of high exposure to pollutants overlap with various population groups. It was cool to see just how quickly we could get this up and running, again without too much pain on the technical front. The instructors encouraged us to try discovering geographic datasets on our own — it can be as simple as looking up the locality on Google, alongside a couple filtering search terms. For instance: “site:.gov GIS “Long Beach””

Ultimately, as students and researchers of the digital humanities, it may not be necessary to be a pro at ArcGIS or other tools that often have a steep learning curve. However, having proficiency in GIS principles and tools can allow you to take your research to new places and levels.