Lab 2

For lab 2, I choose to take a look at “The Delek Achives”. This project is a research initiative by the Delek Education Foundation that intends to identity and shine light on religion-based discrimination in India’s schools. This project is different from most by the way it uses real first hand accounts of discrimination rather than data from surveys. Most stories from the project are written by people who are directly associated with the education system in India. The posts are usually concerned with deeply traumatic experiences that come from teachers, students, administration, and even parents. The hope of the Delek Archives is to reimagine the act of archiving as an open collaboration. The project aims to demonstrate that discrimination is just as much a personal narrative as it is a systemic pattern.

I like the approach this project takes. It uses a story to shine light on discrimination rather than relying on data to tell how horrible something like discrimination is. I think people respond much stronger to a personal anecdote than to data. To me, this project is successful and more projects dealing with emotional matter should consider a personal narrative approach.

Lab 2: DH Exploration

For the exploration of the digital humanities project I looked at the Baltimore Traces project, this project looks at neighborhood changes in different historic Baltimore neighborhoods, and the project looks at how people interact with these changes. One of the initial pieces of data I looked at was an interview with a juror in the trial of the Catonsville 9, this was not a case I was familiar with but with some research, one can find that it was a case regarding the trial of 9 catholic protestors burning draft information. There is a series of interviews and a blog about this event and how people interact with this piece of history.

Since the data is predominantly interview based, I understand that it might be a little more involved than just quantitative data about the movement of people (even if I would have found that very interesting).  There is a lot of data here but the map looks very sparse, however, the concession would be that I am not familiar with Baltimore. The real meat is found looking at the list of data that it presents in the project drop-down tab. Lots of interviews/blogs that are relevant to the various neighborhoods. If I was the director of this assignment then I would have a clear and concise mission statement on the about drop-down. Other than there is a wealth of interpersonal knowledge to be found here.

Lab 2

The DH project I looked at was The Connections in Sound Project by Patrick Egan. The project aimed to create connections within the thirty-seven collections of Irish Traditional Music in the American Folklore Center in the Library of Congress and the role of the internet and archives. Egan also examined the type of music, how it was collected, and how it can be accessed within the collections.

The website for the project only has two pages. The first page contains two quotes from John Miles Foley’s (2012) book Oral traditions and the Internet. Clicking on the link contained within the author’s name opens to the University of Illinois press’ page for the book. The first page also contains a brief introduction to the project. The first chart on the page shows a color-coded list of the types of music contained within nine of the collections. The second visualization creates connections between the type of music, ten collections, how the physical recordings were initially done, and how they can be accessed.  The second page looks at mapping where and when each of the collections came from.

The visualization of the first chart can be filtered for the type of music. The second visualization is a little bit harder to make sense of because all the connections overlap and interweave so it is difficult to figure out what connects where. This problem was solved by making each of the parts movable which makes it easier to see the connections. The introduction to the third visualization on the second page says it uses US census data from 1900 to 1980 and the location of the collections on a map of the United States. I cannot see the map or the census data, so it looks like a bunch of somewhat randomly placed dots that each correspond to part of a larger collection. However, clicking on the dots is cool because it opens a google document that contains their data from the collections for the project. One of the things I was expecting with this project was accessible audio files for the music like the religious sounds project we looked at in class.

 

The digital humanities project that I chose to look at was the My Nola, My story project. This project uses a variety of digital materials to help preserve New Orleans’s culture and history. The project is a  collection of different video stories of New Orleans natives. The topics in the stories range from art, fashion, education, housing, etc. The material spans a wide range of topics surrounding New Orleans culture in order to make a functioning collection of narratives. The videos also range from 4-18 minutes so it’s very easy to surf around and see a plethora of different videos relating to New Orleans Culture.

 

I really enjoyed this project. I can see the purpose of it is obviously to preserve the culture and also create a universal/accessible website where people can view different narratives.  Being able to hover over the icons and directly pop into a video that you can also easily leave was a feature that I liked about this project.  I also think it was beneficial for them to include a variety of different topics such as policies, housing, and the art world. I believe these topics allow different people to see all of the different moving parts of New Orleans culture.

Lab 2

I chose to review the “The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project” (AEMP) digital humanities project. This project’s purpose is to identify and map areas where gentrification has happened and map areas where evictions rates are high. This project also provides a clearinghouse of information and resources for those who are threatened with eviction. The project uses a variety of presentation tools such as maps, software, media, visualizations, reports, murals, magazines, books, and oral histories. The information is gathered and shared through collaboration and processed by the roughly 30 volunteers that work with the AEMP. All of these materials are analyzed and provided to the public to advocate for housing rights.

I found the project description to be detailed and the rationale for the project necessary given the housing crisis in many large cities. This project originated in the San Francisco Bay Area but has since expanded to other cities across California as well as in New York City and Brazil. While the data model may currently be limited to a few select locations, I think the method of collection of data can be applied anywhere. I also like the use of various presentation tools consisting of digital and non-digital materials, which makes it easy for a wide range of users. This project is also a great example of how social experiences/issues can provide the basis for a digital humanities project. The collaborative nature of the project also means that the tools and media used in this project can be applied globally.

 

 

lab2

singingbox331

I looked at a project called Singing Box 331 which aims to provide an enhanced re-telling of an article about Mohican Hymns that was written in 2019. It is a “glammed-up” news article with pictures and some audio files and large walls of text. It features a non-linear style navigation experience for the user, however, there are not that many directions to go. The materials for this project would be mostly written text, and some images/audio clips as I mentioned above. The processing method of this project is the non-linear assortment of the walls of text and images. There are categories like “introduction”, “music”, and “conclusion” to name a few. The presentation used by the project is a website.

I personally hold the opinion that this project would be much better with more visual and audio representation of the material, rather than huge walls of text. To me, DH projects are unique compared to normal informative websites because of the ability to create an interactive experience for the user, or even display information in an unorthodox way. Especially in today’s world, most people do not have the patience to go through many huge portions of text on a white background. I would think it would be more effective to present the information in shorter snippets, highlighting the important parts of the information. The information would be more memorable and accessible to a wider audience.

Lab 2

I looked at jsLDA and their goal is to model data in text. It takes documents (not documents in the way we know them, but rather, chunks of texts) and uses various stop words to sort themes. For example one that the website talks about is studying how certain themes came up in the state of the union address and classifies them by category.

In my opinion the project was very cool and it even had a user-end interaction option. However, the website lacked substance. The project was there but the presentation lacked anything of any real excitement value. Additionally, the site only has one page. It offers little information, poorly explains the purpose of the project, and presents it’s user interface in such a way that it seems almost disinteresting.

Lab 2

The website I visited was rather unique compared to the ones we saw in class since it was primarily concerned with any given visitor making an account and using their software, but we will get into that later. The website itself is called Recogito, and it is monitored by Pelagios who is a digital humanities initiative whose goal is to connect different data about the past together. With this being where Recogito is coming from, it is no surprise that this website is built around “collaborative document annotation”. This means that it is a tool to help scholars, or anyone really, annotate images or texts, then allowing their work to become public data for others to use and look at. It shows one how to annotate images and text through the program and then share their progress and data with anyone they choose. Overall, it is a tool that can be used to produce data that can be shared and worked on with multiple people.

My analysis of the website is quite straight forward since their website the way it is structured is quite straightforward. The entire site is built around the visitor using the software, so it has many nuances that are strategically placed there in order to help facilitate and encourage the people visiting to do just that. For one, the website one has three links and one of them is the login tab. This is created in this manner to give the person a very limited amount of options, unlike many other websites who have many tabs/links. At the bottom of the webpage, there are many comments they chose to rotate through their homepage, as well as statistics that reflect very well on their website. Overall, I think the website is structured very well and is shaped for it’s function, which is to get as many accounts and data from the users as possible. As far as the data itself is concerned, I am not sure there is a real way to know what type it, besides the fact that it is composed of texts and maps. On the other hand though, one can know that the website is not providing data itself, the website designers desire the user to provide the data so the range of topics can vary from person to person.

Lab 1

I choose to highlight this exercise because it demonstrates how important time when dealing with data. When time is not important, the spiral is very loose and with a lot of space in between. When time is the most important component, the closeness becomes very precise and crucial.

For the schema, I would look at how much time was spent actively driving vs how much time the car was parked. This would be fairly straight forward as I would go down the list of times and note when the car was a rest stop, getting food, getting gas, etc. I would then total that time and the time spent driving which is indicated by the long stents in between stops. For the data diaries, I will be doing “How many variations to a line”, “Draw your breathe”, and “Color palette testing”.

Lab 1

*I am proud of one blue-circle drawing that was timed for five minutes. Because it is where I started catching on—following directions, and creating “art.”

*The most important thing (other than the trip itself) is safety. My entries would take into account Shell gasoline stops being predetermined: during daylight, with Subways or McDonalds, and only in suburbs.

My Data Diaries project will use #6, #10, and the #18 exercises.