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Final Blog Post

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a relaxing break. These last few weeks have been very productive, and I have reached important milestones for the semester. I was able to meet with Dr. French and Maria Cabail on the 9th to discuss the next steps for the Seminole War visualization project. Maria compiled data on Dade’s Command, a detachment of 108 men that were killed in an engagement on December 28th, 1835. This engagement is considered to be the start of the second Seminole War. The data compiled included birthplace, enlistment location, and profession from two book sources and enlistment cards from Ancestry. Armed with this data, I also updated the larger dataset from the Sprague text and optimized it for Tableau by grouping types of diseases, standardizing names and spelling, and other small changes. Then, I redid the visualizations I created last semester using these two datasets, and placed them in a Tableau “story” as a proof of concept.

I also generated embed codes for each individual visualization, and tested them on my own website so Dr. French could embed them on the Veterans Legacy project website as a learning object. Here are the visualizations on my website. Excuse the dust, I have a lot of work to do this break!

I also had a chance to work on the FLDH website with Dr. French. I showed him the work I had been doing on the current website, but we both found that updating Commons in a Box to the new version was the first step. I emailed Dr. French about gaining access to a sandbox, and I hope to continue work on that project next semester as a representative for my institution in FLDH.

Although I wish I had been able to get more done this semester, I think that both projects are at a good place to continue work next semester. Although the internship is over, I hope to present on the visualization project and to continue my work on the FLDH website next semester, so I’m very glad I was able to begin them as part of this internship!

Have a great rest of your semester and break!

Mia

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Blog Post 3

Hello everyone!

I hope you have had a productive few weeks. I’ve been overwhelmed with my work and personal schedule for the past several weeks, but have now passed crunch time and have a chance to refocus on the website redesign. I was granted access to the website several weeks ago, and I’m currently working though each page to find expired links and consider how best to refresh the page. It’s always takes me some time for me to familiarize myself with a website I did not have a hand in creating, so I want to make sure I understand the organization decisions before I change anything. I’m paying particular attention to top level navigation, too. The FLDH Inaugural Conference will be held next March, and the website update should have an easily accessible link in the navigation for information on the event.

The website currently uses the default Commons in a Box, which provides a community space for engagement, but might need some customization to make it a more dynamic page. I’m also looking into the newer Commons in a Box OpenLab to see if an update would be a good choice (and would be easy to maintain after the internship is over).

Members of the group have also started sending me information to add to the main page, so I have been doing that for the past several weeks. Updating the announcements page has let me see exactly how many different places information has to be updated in order for a cohesive web experience, too.

Have a great day,

Mia

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October 3 Post

Hi everyone! I hope you’ve had a good few weeks.

Since my last post, I have reviewed survey results and started to create a plan for the FLDH website redesign. Last semester, Bob Clarke surveyed members of the consortium about their opinions on the current website. They were asked to name specific aspects of the site that they enjoyed, and also identify their least favorite parts.

From my initial review, it looks like many consortium members were unhappy with the navigation of the site, the lack of updates, and the static landing page, which are going to be my areas of focus for the next few weeks. I’ve already started looking for inspiration from other digital humanities websites around the web, and I’ve found a few that should inspire me in the next part of the design process. Some of the possibilities include the UCLA and Yale DH pages.

My process has been a little slower than I would have hoped, but I hope to really ramp up my work and submit possible changes to the steering committee within the next few weeks. Once I have my suggestions in for approval, I’d like to switch gears and continue work on the visualization project, and create a general training for those DH scholars who are interested in using Tableau Public.

I hope everyone is doing well!

Mia

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Internship Blog Post #1

Hi everyone!

I hope everyone has had a productive start to the semester. My internship is with the Center for Digital Humanities and Research, where I will be working on two different projects.

The first project is a redesign of the Florida Digital Humanities website. I hope to update the website so that it becomes a location for Florida DH professionals to engage with each other and to share best practices. So far, I have discussed possible directions for the website with Dr. French, my internship mentor, and have received survey results from FLDH members from the previous intern, Bob Clarke. This week, I hope to review these results and begin my work plan for the remainder of the semester and to set priorities based on the wants, needs, and desires of members.

The second project I’m working on this semester is the continuation of a visualization project I began last semester in my Texts & Technology in History course. Last semester, I took a selection of casualty data from the Seminole War from the index of a book by John T. Sprague and used Tableau Public to visualize the cause and location of deaths of soldiers that served in the conflict. I’ve included some of the visualizations from last semester below: 

On August 31st, I met with the members of the visualization team to discuss our work plan for the semester. In addition to the Sprague data, the team is also compiling other data sources, including enlistment records from the U.S. Army and tables from other historical publications. It is our hope that this data will help us create a more nuanced data visualization of the Seminole War that will combine casualty data with enlistment data, occupation, and place of birth for soldiers that will help create a historical narrative. We also hope to document our data standardization strategies and workflow so that they can serve as a best practice for future scholarly projects in the digital humanities. This week, the team is researching different data sources (Including Ancestry.com) and having discussions about how to standardize data fields and clean up existing  data. My next steps are to review my visualization from last semester and document how I standardized my own data, and to refamiliarize myself with Tableau Public.

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Paper Proposal

Paper Proposal

For my semester paper, I’d like first to do a short literature review on the representation of sensitive data in visualizations, and then apply this to some basic narrative visualizations created with Tableau using the casualty list pulled from the Sprague text. One of my research interests is looking at how libraries and archives catalog information that pertains to people, and in identifying how institutional ideologies can impact the way information is organized and represented. I’d like to apply this focus to the representation of graveyards and war deaths by digital humanities projects, and which hopefully will inform work moving forward. Projects like http://www.poppyfield.org/ make use of narrative storytelling techniques to present data that has an emotional component, and I think that this would help inform any future visualizations. I’ve included several useful articles I will read for this paper below, and I will also incorporate several of the class readings, including Headrick and Vensa, into the paper.

Related Articles

Manovich, L. (2012). Museum without walls, art history without names: visualization methods for Humanities and Media Studies. Software Studies Initiative.

Ikkala, E., Koho, M., Heino, E., Leskinen, P., Hyvönen, E., & Ahoranta, T. Prosopographical Views to Finnish WW2 Casualties Through Cemeteries and Linked Open Data. Retrieved from https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/publications/2017/ikkala-et-al-cemeteries-2017.pdf

Koho, M., Hyvönen, E., Heino, E., Tuominen, J., Leskinen, P., & Mäkelä, E. (2017, May). Linked death—representing, publishing, and using Second World War death records as linked open data. In European Semantic Web Conference (pp. 369-383). Springer, Cham. Retrieved from https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/publications/2017/koho-et-al-linked-death-extended-2017.pdf

Galloway, A. (2011). Are some things unrepresentable?. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(7-8), 85-102. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263276411423038

Ekbia, H., Mattioli, M., Kouper, I., Arave, G., Ghazinejad, A., Bowman, T., … & Sugimoto, C. R. (2015). Big data, bigger dilemmas: A critical review. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(8), 1523-1545. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.00909

Klein, L. F. (2013). The image of absence: Archival silence, data visualization, and James Hemings. American Literature, 85(4), 661-688. Retrieved from

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Blog Post #10 Misa

Thomas J. Misa is the director of the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. The institute “makes primary source materials relating to the history of information technology available for researchers”. According to his website, Misa has also taught “courses on computer history, the global economy, technology and culture, business history, industrial culture, technological risk, and history of engineering”. Misa’s publication history covers an impressive range of technological history topics, from his 1998 work A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865-1925 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) to his most recent publication, FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World with Jeffrey R. Yost, which interrogates a the national science foundation Fastlane Program, a grants management database.

From Leonardo to the Internet provides an overview of “the relationship between technology and society” that spans half a millennia, starting with the relationship between the court system of patronage and technological growth during the Medici period of Italy. As discussed in class, Misa never provides readers with a stable definition of “technology”, and he highlights this in the last chapter of his book:

The term technology has a specific if largely unwritten history, but in this book I have used it in a broad and flexible way. Indeed, my underlying goal has been to display the variety of technologies, to describe how they change across time, and to understand how they interacted with societies and cultures. The key point is that technologies are consequential for social and political futures. I have not found a simple definition of technology that vividly conveys the variety of its forms or adequately emphasizes the social and cultural interactions and consequences that I believe are essential to understand” (p. 300).

Much like Headrick’s When Information Came of Age, Misa’s title provides a detailed (but readable) overview of specific historical events and the technologies created during those periods. Unlike Headrick’s text, Misa spends significantly more time discussing the political and social machinations that took place in tandem with the technological advances, and allows the reader to ponder if the technology led the cultural developments or if the cultural developments were responsible for the technology.

I think that Misa’s work deserves its place on the T&T reading list, and that the above block quote illustrates the importance of the text for the program. Misa’s text seeks to make explicit the connection between technology and society, and provides readers a solid foundation for future research in the topic.

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Blog Post #9 Headrick

Headrick’s When Information Came of Age shows that as the complexity of societies increases, it becomes more important to have accessible and easily understandable organization systems for all different types of information. The book begins with interrogating the term “information age” as it is used to describe the advent of computer-facilitated information. Instead, Headrick argues that pinpointing the “start” of the information age is dependent on the discipline, and he discards several of the possible beginnings of the information age with the following quote: “The information age has no beginning, for it is as old as humankind” (p. 8). Instead he finds that there are periods of “acceleration” of information creation and access that coincide with the creation of new technologies, including the creation of the printing press, the computer, and modern mapmaking.

He organizes his chapters around the prevailing systems of categorization into five “technologies of knowledge”, although he does acknowledge that many of these categories can serve more than one function:

Systems to gather information: Journalistic methods, researchers, historians, spies, censuses, laboratories, etc.

Systems to name and classify and access information: Library classification systems, scientific taxonomies, etc.

Systems to transform information: The transformation from narrative into lists, data into graphs, etc.

Systems to store and retrieve information: Dictionaries, encyclopedias, telephone books, directories, libraries, gardens, databases

Systems to communicate information: postal service, messengers, telephones, email, websites

He closes the text by again arguing that is important to not think of one specific time frame as an “information age”:

The purpose of this book is to argue is to argue that the information revolution in which we live is the result of a cultural change that begin roughly 3 centuries ago, a change as important as the political industrial revolutions for which the 18th and early 19th centuries are so well-known (p. 219).

However, despite the fact that Headrick’s text is a solid, historical overview of Western information organization, it fails to provide critical interrogation of the ideologies that created (or are upheld) by these systems, or to delve into the political atmosphere that shaped them. The text also pays a great deal of attention to providing a detailed overview of the creation organizational systems but is able to discuss each one in what one reviewer called an “unusually readable” text (Martin, 2001).

I first read this text in a narrative information visualization class, and I think it provided a very important grounding in the history of visualization and organizations, but after our class conversation, I do think that the T&T reading list would be better served with a title that more closely examines the critical dimension of information storage and organization, and/or one that also provides an overview of non-Western forms of organization and visualization.

For more information, check out my notes for the class presentation. 

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Blog Post #8 Vandendorpe

One of my first impressions of From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library was that the chapter layout does an excellent job of mimicking the hypertextual environment that he discusses throughout the book. He highlights the fact that he first wrote this book as a hyperlinked collection of short entries that users could navigate through at their own pace and based on their own interests, and that it was only in the final stages of production that he re-mediated the text into the traditional print format. The book’s thematic organization makes sense for the print edition, but I also would have liked to experience the hypertextual format and compared it to the traditionally formatted text to see if the additional agency would change my outlook on the content.

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Blog Post #7, Vensa

Vensa’s collection of edited essays examines the intersection of art and technology, with a focus on information storage and completion. She argues that artists must make use of the “code of search engines and the aesthetics of navigation” in order to fully embrace the current information and artistic landscape, and in her first chapter shows the historical precedence for the artistic interrogation of ‘non artistic’ systems, starting with the increased understanding of the human body’s systems. This new understanding of human and biological systems, and the increased amount of ‘data about data’ means that we must become more aware of how (and what) data is being collected about us.

Klein (in chapter 4) muses on the genre of the new ‘data-driven’ age, and reminds readers that data can often obscure, manipulate, and control our realities, and that “data remind us that we are being colonized by our own economy, outsourced and psychologically invaded” (p. 87). In addition to these sobering thoughts on the way that data creates our world, Klein also finds opportunity in databases, since they enable the artist/user/viewer to sort and experience information in a variety of ways, and almost all new art/media is based on this structure, even if the artists chooses not to make it visible.

Paul’s chapter 5 tackles the idea of the narrative in the database, and shows how its ability to create a non-linear narrative controlled by the user (or reader, or viewer, depending on the media included) can also “become a consistent visual meta-narrative”, especially when categorizing politically charged data. Paul also spends a significant amount of time discussing the database “back end” or the data container itself, paying specific mind to the “tension between data structure/stream and the visual form” (p. 97). What does the artist control/keep hidden? What is visible/accessible to the viewer?

I think Vensa’s collection still deserves its place on the T&T reading list, as it interrogates the database as not only a system of information storage, but also as a foundation of a vast collection of varied art projects created today. Although some of the later chapters should be paired with more current research on game design and creation, the introductory chapters on databases as foundation and the descriptions of specific art projects that defamiliarize the database and create a conversation are foundational, especially Manovich’s chapter 2, which provides an interrogation of the database as a symbolic form.

For more, check out our Vensa presentation. 

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Orality and Literacy

This is my first time reading Ong’s Orality and Literacy, in spite of his prevalence within the T&T coursework. Before I get into specifics, I feel like Ong’s work is a foundational T&T text, and helps the reader gain an understanding of how the human mind has changed based on the shift from an oral culture to a literate one. After reading Bolter’s Writing Spaces last week, I am interested in the connection between remediation and Ong’s discussion of the differences between orality and literacy. Bolter mostly looks at media, and in particular writing and reading across mediums, and he cites Ong several times throughout his text. After discussion in class on Tuesday night, I agree that reading Ong before Bolter would provide a stronger context for the types of shifts that Bolter discusses, especially when it comes to the idea of closure within print mediums. In Chapters 5 and 6, Ong discusses the creation of the longer form print narrative and the affordances that each offer the creator and the receiver. He compares the “closed” structure of print (which can support a long, carefully plotted narrative) to the episodic oral poem, an “utterance” (p. 123) shaped by each singer or poet that recited it and the situation at hand and rarely, if ever, performed all at once. In his discussion of the narrative, Ong also cautions against applying narrative ideas to oral composition, as “it hardly does justice to describe it as a varying form of an organization it does not know and cannot conceive of” (p. 140). After finishing Orality and Literacy, I want to read Gregory Ulmer’s Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy, which analyzes the shift to electronic literacy. Since Ong’s text was written 30 years ago, he did not have the opportunity to fully explore the shift from literacy and the impact of the electronic text on communication or cognition, but Ulmer continues the conversation in his research.

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Bolter, February 13th

“We depend in a variety of ways on our knowledge of print in order to read and write hypertexts”. (Bolter, 2001, p. 45).

Bolter’s Writing Spaces presents the concept of remediation, or that each new medium seeks to replace the old at the same time as it also “borrows and reorganizes” aspects of the previous writing space or technology in an attempt to optimize it (p. 23). Bolter explains that some of these remediations (such as the shift from papyrus to the manuscript) take place slowly, while others are more “traumatic”, like creation of electronic reading and writing spaces (p.24). In the next chapter, he focuses on the effect of hypertext on the writing spaces, and how it in part dismantles the traditional hierarchical structure of printed books and manuscripts by allowing movement between pages of information outside of the traditional structure of a text, and instead favors a topical organization. Writers can use hypertext to select an individual path through the information at hand, one that can be unique for each reader based on their own interests or needs, and “deep reading” is possible since information that would be relegated to foot or endnotes can be included as a parallel pathway for readers. In addition, the “malleability” of the writing space means content can be organized and changed by the creator at their will, in contrast to the closed system of a printed book. However, Bolter argues that print still informs the way we read and engage with electronic text, and that this remediation is still heavily dependent on current, print-based structures like hierarchical arrangement and the supremacy of print that have still not been entirely replaced by the new, remediated system. Even though Bolter’s next chapter does consider the visual element to electronic texts and how it continues to remediate not only textual media but also visual, I would be interested to see an updated edition that begins to evaluate the impact of virtual reality and augmented reality as it relates to the remediated writing space, and of the impact of “stock” website design content management systems that create a transparent platform for the media at hand.

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Spatial Mapping, January 30th

Dr. Earley-Spadoni’s January 30th presentation on her Infinite Armenias project to our class provided additional insight into her 2017 paper that called for increased interdisciplinary collaboration between the archaeological sciences, GIS experts, and the digital humanities. One particular area of interest in her paper (and one that I think will be useful for our project) is the ability for deep mapping to assign concurrent tags or titles to contested or controversial territories. She emphasizes that these contested areas “render simple geographic nomenclature a complicated and highly politicized enterprise” (p. 97). I would also agree, and also assert that “simple geographic nomenclature” is almost never the reality of mapping, as the selection of language, inclusion and data to any map or visualization is can be dependent on the ideologies of the creator and the overseeing agency (see Dork et al’s discussion of critical information visualization). 

By combining a traditional map with deep mapping strategies like narrative, images, and the above contested naming, users can begin to more fully contextualize the region in ways that promote critical engagement. For our St. Augustine project, we should make sure that are selecting and highlighting information mindfully, and incorporating personal narratives in conjunction to historical research might be a good way to begin. During our class trip to St. Augustine, several of the historians mentioned specific groups that might be otherwise overlooked within the traditional narrative of the cemetery, including the burial regiment (or contractors, depending on the source) that retrieved the bodies from the Dade Massacre who were very likely certainly slaves, and the presence of several graves of “Unknown Indians” who are not identified by conflict or tribe. Deep mapping might be a way to provide more information about these groups of burials and contextualize them within the cemetery in a way that takes into account the history of these groups within the American military narrative. Dr. Earley-Spadoni also discusses the ability of visualizations to make connections between geographic locations over time, and we may want to consider mining data about soldier movements before their deaths in the style of the University of Virgina’s VisualEyes The Spaces of Khacloe Drubling.

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St. Augustine Trip, February 2nd

Our trip to St. Augustine National Cemetery really helped to place the site into the context of St. Augustine as a city, while the discussions local historians, librarians and city employees helped to place the site in a historical context. 

In addition to the admittedly impressive pyramid vaults for the Seminole War dead (above), I was struck by both the layout of the cemetery and the coverage of American conflicts that were represented.

Alison Simpson (Florida National Guard Command Historian) provided a great overview of the reorganization of the grave sites and the differences in the markers throughout the Cemetery. Soldiers that served in the Spanish American War are next to World War I Veterans, next to wives, infant children, and markers for both unknown soldiers and for “Unknown Indians”. 

When did these “Unknown Indians” die? How? What was their connection to the cemetery/area? Their contributions to their communities or to our understanding of their historical implications? None of that information is easily accessible to visitors without a guide highlighting them, as their markers are indistinguishable from other more traditional burial plots. 

I think that one way to increase understanding and engagement with the cemetery is with both a macro and micro view of the cemetery. Since the site covers hundreds of years of US conflicts, beginning with a visualization of the cemetery as a whole (maybe in the vein of Halloran’s The Fallen of World War II short film, or Poppy Field by D’Efilippo) may allow visitors to contextualize the space and help them to identify specific populations of interest. Then, personal stories or historic events can be highlighted through transmedia storytelling, which could include videos, audio, or narrative text. Delivery methods might be through a mobile app or a web-based program. 

I think readings in narrative information visualization and history might also assist in the creation of this engagement project. Headrick’s When Information Came of Age is already on our reading list, and is a great overview of the organization and dissemination of information in the 18th century, and Drucker’s Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display and Dork et al.’s Critical InfoViz: Exploring the Politics of Visualization both examine the ethics of visualizing information for the digital humanities. 

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My generous feelings for the Economics of Attention have cooled after reading the second half of the book (and because of the conversation we had in class last week about his less than stellar citing), but I still think there is some valuable content in last four chapters. I think the most useful chapter for T&T purposes is chapter 5, Style/Substance Matrix, as it provides a concise summary of his argument (that oscillation between style and substance is vital for the new information economy), and that his four part matrix was helpful in understanding this concept.

In the explanation of his first spectrum (Signal), he also reiterated that there should be no value judgements for any aspect of the matrix, stating that “no point on the spectrum is intrinsically evil or virtuous; it seeks to describe rather than proscribe, to analyze rather than to condemn” (p. 150). In other words, that unornamented “stuff” should not be privileged over fancy “fluff”, a theme that runs through each of his spectrums. Instead, he tries to illustrate that each spectrum should be considered to be a circle more than a straight line, and that we should move between both extremes depending on the situation, and the “stuff and fluff” in question. In fact, I would have liked to see this chapter in the first half of the book, because I feel like it gives his argument a little more context.

In contrast to chapter 5’s usefulness, I think that chapter 7, The Audit of Virtuality, could do with some major updates. Although I agree with his argument that higher education should take inspiration from the business sector’s professional development courses on alternative schedules, I felt as though some of his points about the effectiveness of the online class in contrast to the traditional, in-person course are weak. In particular, he doesn’t spend much time discussing faculty engagement with students within the online course. I would be interested to see his opinion on the flipped classroom model that has been popular in recent years and how they fit into his view of traditional instruction. One other passage in this chapter that was particularly irksome to me was on page 235, where he was derisive about the concept of the “wired classroom”, which completely discounts the varying digital literacy skills of students (even today) and the benefits of in-person instruction.

I’m unsure about the inclusion of Economics of Attention on the T&T reading list. Although I feel that some of the text is still useful for the field, other chapters are dated since they do not include social media use or an updated view on online courses. I’m interested to see what everyone else has to say!

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Lanham’s Economics of Attention, Part One

To start off this semester, we read the first four chapters of Dr. Richard Lanham’s The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Lanham is an expert rhetorician and professor emeritus in English at the University of California, with a focus on the art of rhetoric throughout history. He has also served as an expert witness in cases that concern creative copyright and plagiarism questions, and his article on the his work as an expert witness is a fascinating read.

Lanham’s central thesis in The Economics of Attention is that our economy is shifting away from a focus on what he calls “stuff”, or physical items that are produced, purchased, and sold. Instead, he believes that the today’s economy is concerned with attention, or “fluff” as he refers to it throughout his book. With an overabundance of information, fluff that can grab and hold attention (and therefore inspire some desirable action) has become vital to every aspect of the economy, including business, academia, pop culture, and art. He argues that this repositions those who study the humanities (and specifically, those that study rhetoric) as vital in the production cycle, and that “the arts and letters, which create attention structures to teach us how to attend to the world, must be central to acting in the world as well as contemplating it” (p. 14). In other words, stuff must be supplemented by and is often supplanted in importance by the fluff (brand names, controversies, ad campaigns, etc.) that surrounds it. He also charges that to be unaware of how the fluff is created is to be unprepared to be a member of the new attention economy.

In his second chapter, Lanham shows the shift from stuff to fluff by using examples of art movements in the last century, and begins (and ends) with a very useful overview of the Italian Futurists, the DaDa movement, and Pop Art. All three of these movements were more concerned with the attention paid to the art, as opposed to a focus on the artistic items themselves, like Duchamp’s Fountain, a piece that is vital to the art world because of the conversation and controversy surrounding it, not because of the piece itself. Lanham links these pieces of attention to a more modern example, Christo’s Running Fence, a beautiful piece that only existed for two weeks, but was important because of the extensive creation process, which required hundreds of moving parts, employees, and official permits for its creation. Lanham charges that art projects like these show the attention economy in sharp relief, because “once you get the point, learn the lesson, the experience evaporates” (p. 56).

I think that most of Lanham’s arguments hold up well, even a decade and change after publication, though I would love to see an updated edition that dives into social media websites and how these sites disrupt text with images and media clips. I would be particularly interested to hear what he thinks about social media videos that integrate text with soundless video, or the fact that the vast majority of eBooks still try to mimic the classic monograph. I’ll withhold judgement on if this book should continue to be on the T&T core text until next week when we read the second half, but so far I think it’s a very useful text on the history of rhetoric and the shifting academic landscape we find ourselves in today.