With this week’s readings on Mapping, I reflected on the digital maps I use everyday. In one trip to meet up with friends at a new restaurant, I may open Apple Maps on my phone to see what street the restaurant is on and which route I need to take, what the weather looks like for the next few hours, and whether or not public transportation is on time or delayed. The maps on my phone allow me to consider all of this in the five minutes before I head out the door.

In “How to Lie with Maps,” Mark Monmonier describes the three attributes (i.e., scale, projection, and symbolization) maps are comprised of. In considering my regular use of these tools, symbols proved the most relevant, at least on the surface. All of them use shape, orientation, and hue in a number of ways.

• Apple Maps: There are symbols to classify different vehicles or modes of transportation, places of interest, routes, color/hue for traffic density, to name a few. Apple maps provides a ratio scale that adjusts as you zoom or rotate the map, although as a non-driver in New York City, I less frequently think in distance, rather defaulting to “stops” as my unit of measurements, even though those are not standard.
• Accuweather: Weather apps use a variety of symbolic elements to convey information. One of the most noticeable for this subject is color, as it relates to precipitation. The app I use provides four different color spectrums to indicate the severity of four different types of precipitation: rain, snow, ice, and mix. To Apple’s credit, if your directions include public transportation, it tells you how many stops you need to travel on a particular line.
• NYC Subway: The colored subway lines can act as indicators and abstractions, a quick point of reference if, like me, you forget which lettered trains provide express service, but know you take a yellow line to and from The Graduate Center. On top of that, colored service alerts indicate good service or delays.

What I’m not considering in the five minutes before I leave my apartment, are the ways the information I’m presented is influenced by outside forces, accessibility of the symbols I’m interpreting, and the convenience afforded to me by living in the West.

• First, businesses and other entities don’t automatically appear on these platforms. The three most used navigation applications, Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps, which combined occupy 95% of audience reach, have mechanisms in place for businesses to make themselves visible, all by way of marketing or advertisement. Google and Apple require business owners to create profiles via their respective services, and then use a variety of criteria to rank which businesses are displayed to users. Waze requires customers to pay to place adds that pop up as destinations on a map a users drive by. In these cases, English proficiency, access to internet enabled technology, and cost, among other things, act as barriers and restrict what is and isn’t a “place of interest.”
• Red and green feature prominently as symbols, often working at ends of a spectrum, indicating the severity of precipitation, the quality of train service, and the status of traffic congestion on the roads. It is also the most common type of color vision discrepancy.
• In “Dividing Lines,” Mayukh Sen highlights the disparity in utility of these tools and their failure to capture the landscape of former colonies, often in the Global East or Global South, in a way that effectively renders them unimportant. In a time where everything feels like it’s at our fingertips, enabled by the internet, exclusion is dangerous because the phenomenon persists despite the common notion that the internet has charted everything. This reinforces the impacts and ideals of colonialism by rendering what is covered, often in the West or in English speaking areas, visible and the rest untraceable.

As I traveled around town this weekend, I tried to consider where I encountered maps, how I used them, and what their limits were. I would love to hear, or discuss in class, others’ observations.

Link to map here.

I chose to map something not traditionally considered mappable: the creative writing process. 

In 2021, I wrote one haiku (or multiple) every day for 100 days. My goal was simply to write more regularly, and the condensed form of the haiku helped lower the barrier to entry. 

A few weeks into the process, I started logging the daily efforts in Day One, a journaling app that adds metadata — like time, location, and weather conditions — to journal entries. This is what allowed me to eventually map the results. 

I jotted down the haikus as soon as they came to me, which often occurred at my apartment in Brooklyn, as well as on walks with my dog and even trips to visit family in Vermont, Maine, and elsewhere in the US. I chose to use a heatmap approach when visualizing the haikus to show how they tended to cluster around specific locations.   

I used Carto to visualize the distribution of haikus and give viewers a way to read each haiku while being able to see where it was produced. You can check out the result here. 

The Carto platform is closed-source, but it offers a free 14-day trial (which I used to create this map), as well as 2 years of free use for students through GitHub. (However, the approval process for the latter is cumbersome — I’m still waiting to hear back from GitHub about this.) I don’t know whether my map will disappear from Carto after the free trial ends.

Compared to tools like QGIS, Carto has a much easier-to-use interface, which makes it more accessible (despite the closed-source platform) for a newbie like me to explore and represent geographic data. It also takes just 2 clicks to create a publicly shareable link to the map. 

Overall, the Carto interface allowed me to move quickly from local Excel data — full of latitude and longitude coordinates that don’t mean much without being plotted — to an intuitive and public map. Beyond representing the data, the map opens up new ways of thinking about the creative process — after plotting the poems, it becomes easier to consider how factors like location and routine (e.g., walking the dog) might influence creative output.

Unfortunately, Carto didn’t preserve the line breaks that I had originally placed in the Excel file to divide each of the three lines in the haikus. This undermines the presentation of the haiku form. Given more time, I would research ways to add the line breaks back in by using Carto’s HTML back-end or else by modifying the original CSV file.

In 2010, Photogrammar was created to with the goal of facilitating public access to large, cultural data sets. “Photogrammar provides a web-based visualization platform for exploring the 170,000 photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Office of War Information (OWI) agencies of the U.S. Federal Government between 1935 and 1943” (Photogrammar). These particular photos came out of a government effort to capture the daily lives and experiences of Americans during the Great Depression and World War II. Ultimately, the goal of the project was to demonstrate the impact of the Resettlement Administration’s efforts and to deepen the sense of history unfurling from these significant moments in American culture. Housed at the University of Richmond and made in collaboration with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Photogrammar aims to make an extensive, public photograph collection accessible and engaging. By sorting the collection into categories of interest – including time period, photographer, geographic regions, and thematic content – Photogrammar renders this massive collection of photos approachable. Additionally, Photogrammar features biographies and audio and text interviews with some of the photographers who captured American life for the FSA and OWI.

Photogrammar was made initially by graduate students at Yale University who were interested in using data science to increase public access to cultural datasets. While the project was initially built as a searchable archive and map, it has since grown to include interviews and biographies of the photographers involved in the original FSA and OWI project; as well as recommender systems to supplement archive searches, colorized photos, and more historical context about the project itself.

The project creators began with the photography archive at the Library of Congress, and then sorted the thousands of photo available to them into through the public domain. The project is presented as an interactive map and timeline, organized by region and photographer. On the site’s main menu, you can navigate to specific themes like “work”, “the land”, and “social and personal activity”. You can also conduct a keyword search, which has been designed to incorporate a “recommender system” program to help users hone their search criteria or see how other people commonly searched through the archive’s content. The project creators note that although they’d worked on a facial recognition program to display thumbnails of photo subjects on a map, “the team’s discomfort with some of the algorithmic decision making resulted in the lab remaining private”.

After spending some time navigating the Photogrammar site and familiarizing myself with the different search functions and ways of sorting images, I found the project entertaining and relatively easy to use. My favorite feature of the site is the “Random Selection of Photographs” sidebar, which presents four (rotating, random) photos that can each be clicked on to bring the user into the site. Given the expansive nature of the photo archive, the random photo feature extends a welcoming hand to guide the user into the dataset even if they don’t have a specific research topic in mind. I think that the evolution of Photogrammar – detailed in its “About” page – from graduate student project to collaboration with the Smithsonian suggests a broader use for projects like this one. With so many public archives, like those created by the Library of Congress or the National Archives, access can be stimied simply by a sense of overwhelm at how to approach these resources. If a project like Photogrammar can help the public parse an immense collection of cultural data for research or curiosity’s sake, then I believe that Photogrammar sets a strong example for future research tools that merge data visualizations, storytelling, and history into an accessible, usable public resource.

In 2011, the New York Public Library (NYPL) released its iPad app, Biblion: “The Boundless Library,” in an attempt to create an immersive, expansive, and self-directed digital experience for users, akin to browsing the library stacks. The app was also released, in part, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the opening of the NYPL’s main branch.

Described as both magazine-like and a research archive, the initial release of the app organized numerous documents (e.g. press releases, letters, and periodicals), stories, and images all relating to the 1939-40 World’s Fair. The archived material was also paired with contemporary essays and media providing current context for the Fair’s happenings. While all materials are associated and organized, as they would be in a library or a museum exhibit, the user is also free to explore at-will, clipping-to-clipping, image-to-image, following their own curiosity, in a way entirely unique to them. As one contributor noted, Biblion aimed to translate research into a “less intensive activity… [and] is based on the premise that once original sources are given shape, infinite narratives emerge.” The library’s collection of World’s Fair material was thus made accessible to all users through their intentional choices regarding digital tool/medium, curation, and narration.

The result, while not without criticism, was widely celebrated as bridging a traditional library experience with a rapidly evolving digital world. At the time, digital humanities (“DH”) was also emerging, and in retrospect, Biblion might serve as a foundational example as to how digital tools can be used to augment access to and the experience of the humanities. As a 2011 Atlantic Article noted, NYPL realized a few important things as a precursor to their launch of Biblion: “One, the New York Public Library is a social network with three million active users and two, the New York Public Library is a media outfit.” Building upon these existing, foundational strengths, NYPL was able to create one of the “most innovative online projects in the country even with budget cuts.” Conversely, critics of Biblion largely pointed to a clunky and confusing interface that was prone to crashing and a feeling of too much information being jammed together–which is how I feel when physically entering most libraries. Even in the criticism, there was a recognition of how Biblion served to digitally reimagine and recreate qualities of the NYPL that are foundational to its mission and existence.

Since 2011, Biblion had at least one additional release offering a similar degree of discovery through digitally curated content related to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel. The project seems to have since been abandoned, but it undoubtedly inspired digital curation, the digital humanities, and NYPL’s digital offerings for years to come.

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.

Maria Popova’s “Digital Humanities Spotlight” calls attention to technological accomplishments achieved in the last century. She also aptly states that there’s “a large portion of humanity’s richest cultural heritage that remains buried in analog archives” and it is in the “fledgling discipline” of Digital Humanities (DH) where this information is repositioned/repurposed online via “technologies like infrared scans, geolocation mapping, and optical character recognition.” Popova also states that because of DH, some of the cultural heritage once confined to the “privileged elite” has been “democratize(d).”

I’m familiar with Popova and recall listening to a podcast that Tim Ferriss had with her a while back. I got distracted by all of the enticing posts in the “favorite reads” section that are featured on the website and thus, I meandered away from the “Digital Humanities Spotlight (Spotlights)” and clicked on the post Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss. I was struck to see the words “Hannah Arendt” and “Love” appear together. Could this really be the German-born American historian and political philosopher or to quote Popova, “one of the most piercing intellects of the twentieth century”? Was this the same person that had produced volumes of serious scholarly work – a fraction of which I’ve read and studied including sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism? Is this the same revered academic that is quoted by many other scholars such as Seyla Benhabib, Giorgio Agamben, and Zygmunt Bauman? Yes, indeed!  

The post didn’t disappoint – I learned the cringe worthy fact that Arendt had an affair with her 36-year-old (Nazi leaning) professor, Martin Heidegger, when she was a 19-year-old university student! Some of their love letters are in the book Love and Saint Augustine, where Arendt, in true DH fashion, kept the past alive by:

“…simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts [used] in her political works of the same period. The dissertation became a bridge over which [she] traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg [where she received a doctoral degree in philosophy in 1928] and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine’s question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change” (Amazon).

In reading this post, I started to think that perhaps The Marginalian website, is a digitization project that could be considered DH. The webpage design is not only inviting but addictive and it provides a number of links that captured my interest.  It makes for a satisfying engagement experience, one where  “too much information” allowed me to feel like “a fly on the wall,” because I got to know some juicy personal things about a scholar that I admire and wish to learn more about…but is the site DH? Is it archival or, to quote Prof. Karlin, is it just “a collection”?  Well, according to her website, which Popova started in 2006 and where up until 2021,she had published more than six million pages – or as she states: “if one were to paginate and print everything.” Popova’s former site, Brain Pickings (an earlier version of the Marginalian is described here: Brain Picking – YouTube. According to Wikipedia, Popova is a Bulgarian-born, American-based … writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal both for her writing and for the visual stylistics that accompany it.” As such, my take is that her subject matter is selected to match and/or work with her platform and the tools she uses to curate her writings.

Popova’s site contains not only chockful links to the Arendt/Heidegger love letters, but those of others that weren’t “immune to youth’s impulse to relinquish reason for its counterpoint.” I would imagine that Popova purposely chose this DH(ish) median where the reader has the ability to actually engage “with the possible…with that which might or could be,” as Todd Presner states in “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities” (60). I certainly spent a considerable amount of time on the site – never to think of Arendt in the same way, but in one that did “enrich” my understanding of this complex and brilliant woman. In order to learn more about contemporary political theory, with an emphasis on Hannah Arendt and issues related to  democracy, I would say that Popova’s website isn’t enough for this field(s) of study or for future scholars. Hannah Arendt’s life’s work is extensive and as a result of finding the above referenced post, I searched to see if there are any other DH or interactive websites that feature her work that can really be considered “legit” DH and lo and behold I found the  Library of Congress – Hannah Arendt Digital Collections of Papers with a brief description below:

“The papers of author, educator, political philosopher, and public intellectual Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) constitute a large and diverse collection (25,000 items; 82,597 images) reflecting a complex career. The collection spans the years 1898 to 1977, with the bulk of the material beginning in 1948, three years before Arendt’s naturalization as an American citizen. The papers contain correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book manuscripts, transcripts of Adolf Eichmann’s trial proceedings, notes, printed matter pertaining to Arendt’s writings, family and personal materials, evidence of Arendt’s network of fellow intellectuals, editors, writers, and theorists, and documentation of her academic affiliations and courses taught.“

Here I’d wager that this Digital Collection of Papers is considered archival and DH!

The Zapotec community is one of the 68 indigenous ethnic groups of Mexico and the preservation of the Zapotec language and ancestral knowledge of the community has been challenged by colonial forces for hundreds of years. One of the issues that has impacted Indigenous communities of Mexico has been the refusal to place Indigenous persons in positions of power to guide projects that are meant to help their own communities, such as academic anthropological projects focusing on the preservation of a community’s ancestral knowledge. Project Ticha, “a postcustodial digital archives project, in which a corpus of [Colonial Zapotec texts] is created by digitizing manuscripts in multiple archives and collections” is changing this pattern.

Project Ticha has been a project involving working alongside Zapotec community members to make these colonial Zapotec texts more accessible to the Zapotec community in a way that is “filling in the enormous gap in Zapotec documentation that has left linguistic research about this indigenous language in the hands of a few dedicated experts”. Additionally, the digital tool is “freely available to the public and is committed to remaining so”. This is embodying a key theme discussed in this week’s reading by and for Digital Humanities scholars about the meaning of DH. Ticha is a tool that was created by DH scholars in order to help support a pre-existing larger project of a marginalized community, in this case the project is Zapotec language and ancestral knowledge preservation.

If DH scholars are trying to avoid the neoliberal pattern of using scholarship / research to identify and document the problems of a marginalized without centering how that community wished to be supported through DH projects / resources, this is a great example of working with a community to provide appropriate tools / resources that the community can continue to use to further their own resistance against forms of systemic oppression. Instead of trying to provide a voice for the voiceless, a very colonial way of viewing the voices of indigenous communities, this project instead works with an Indigenous community to designs a mic that can be used to give voice to the community.

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive states its intent to refocus the archive’s spotlight on the pivotal contributions of enslaved and free African, Afro-creole, and Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean world. While this project appears to encompass many of the key elements associated with DH initiatives, it highlights both the potential and challenges inherent in DH scholarship.

In the introduction of “The Digital Black Atlantic,” the authors note several challenges in researching African diasporic communities:

• a lack of a common body of scholarship for Black-centered digital studies creates challenges in framing or contextualizing discussions
• the tendency to assume the epistemology of white, dominant, English-speaking cultures is universal

In light of these challenges, the construction of the ECDA prompts questions about both the materials used and the processes employed. It is immediately evident that there is a lack of diversity in terms of content and language. While the ECDA claims to employ digital tools to “remix” the archive, it does so from a perspective rooted in the Global North.

In the “Introduction” to “Global Debates in the Digital Humanities,” the authors acknowledge that scholars outside of the United States and the United Kingdom have deliberated over the “epistemic and political consequences of the English-speaking hegemony in DH.” When the Western model is imposed as the universal standard, local voices risk being overshadowed.

In “The Digital Black Atlantic,” the authors emphasize the necessity of engaging with local communities and paying attention to “what digital humanities looks like in particular African diasporic contexts.”

The ECDA, in its attempt to reconfigure the collection uniquely, raises a critical question: Is its endeavor to decolonize the archives inadvertently leading to their recolonization?

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive states that “the materials in the archive are primarily authored and published by Europeans.” If the ECDA is an act of “rememory” as described by Toni Morrison, we must consider whose memories are being recollected and by whom as we employ technology to bridge the past and the future.

Digital Humanities, as an academic discipline, aims to broaden our understanding of Human Arts, History, and Culture by pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Within academia, where these subjects are defined and measured for widespread education, Digital Humanities ushers in a new era of learning, offering fresh perspectives on traditional categories. The Early Caribbean Digital Archive serves as an excellent example of how this field breathes life into history, enriching our knowledge of the culture and people of the early Caribbean.

From our earliest days in school, we often learn about Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, particularly the Caribbean. The Early Caribbean Digital Archive takes on the ambitious task of creating an open and accessible repository that aligns with the core principles of Digital Humanities, as articulated by scholars like Matt Gold and Jacqueline Wernimont. Matt Gold emphasizes the unique role of Digital Humanities in advancing humanities research and teaching “through creative use of digital technology.” This mission statement aligns perfectly with the objectives of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive.

This archive not only preserves historical records but also facilitates their distribution for learning and encourages the expansion of our understanding of Early Caribbean History. By harnessing the power of the internet, it fosters a broader discourse and promotes deeper exploration of this rich and complex topic.