Category Archives: Fall 2014

Stitching on the Old to the New: Tracking Change through Maps

I recently attended a workshop on Map Warper at NYPL that dealt with ‘georectifying’, an often arduous and tedious post-digitizing processing of maps, that the NYPL Map Division has managed to turn into a fun and engaged activity by opting to crowdsource it. Funded by the NEH, the Map Warper is a tool suite, used by library staff but also open to the public, to align (or “rectify”) historical maps to today’s digital maps, adding valuable geographic context to old maps. Importantly, all work done is in the public domain. In NYPL’s words,

“Tile by tile, we’re stitching old atlas sheets into historical layers, that researchers can explore with pan-and-zoom functionality, comparing yesterday’s cityscape with today’s. Along with other tools — such as one for tracing building footprints and transcribing address and material information found on the maps — we are laying the groundwork for dynamic geospatial discovery of other library collections: manuscripts and archives, historical newspapers, photography, A/V, ephemera (e.g. menus) etc.”

Given our discussions these past weeks, it seems to me that the points of departure are numerous. I’m reminded of Sarah’s post on mapping the urban setting of fictional characters, when I think about how this tool can help recreate the urban setting of historical characters/personages in today’s context. All one needs is a time period and location, if the Map Division has a corresponding map, lo, and behold! you can see the past and present streetscapes simultaneously. From an urban planning perspective, it is fascinating to see how the cityscape wears the passage of time and explore possible lessons for urban design. I expect it also will help planners visualize and chart the imperceptible movement of real estate, the steady shift of the cityscape over the underlying landscape, which is only possible with tools such as this.

Source: Map Warper, NYPL Labs

“The above image shows a warped map sheet from an 1857 William Perris Real Estate Atlas depicting a section of Manhattan to the southwest of Union Square (see it in the context of the Warper). By stitching this to its sibling sheets from the atlas, we can build a complete 1857 historical layer of Manhattan, observing changes in the street layout and conjuring the ghostly footprints of old buildings. This is just step 1 in a larger integration effort, in which we can pull together archival records, newspapers, photography and other literary and historical documents that are associated with places on the map.”

Link – http://maps.nypl.org/warper/

For those of you interested, there is also a helpful tutorial video on their website to get you started on the project, and helpful Map Division staff are available for tech support.

the interventionists

“To the rescue, many librarians believe computers are the only means to effectively cope with their bulging bookshelves”. 1966. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

I must admit that I am still belaboring the idea of the field of DH as a (partial) means to subvert the strong focus on research and publishing for tenure to instead promote and enhance teaching & learning. Not to throw CUNY & the Academic Commons under the proverbial bus — it’s great, really! And I find it beneficial on many levels, academically and professionally — but the AC as a collaborative place limited to faculty, staff, and doctoral students is perhaps just redefining self-inclusive nature of academia*. The AC is also still imbedded within an institution where tenure is a reality. Sink or swim. Publish or perish (or my personal favorite, “It does not have to be good, it just has to be published,” which has said to me at least once at CUNY).

With all that said, having a centralized, digital place to provide such support and education to peers/faculty is, or could be, extremely progressive. In Digital Humanities Pedagogy Simon Mahony and Elena Pierazzo write, “what is needed is the development of a group space that exists somewhere between study and social areas” (217). The AC could directly answer to the need for such a group space should it eventually allow for a structure to accommodate it.

Within this process is the need to include the teaching parties by fostering their interest in engaging in digital technology into the classroom. Let’s be honest, part of the problem with academia/tenure is not just publishing fees, the subsequent pay-walls, and the cost of journals to libraries, but it’s also JOB COMPLACENCY. In some ways as students of DH we are being trained as the next generation of instructors who can then be on the front lines to promote and support continued efforts to get research, publishing, and tenure out of the ground and into the cloud(s). In Debates in the Digital Humanities Luke Waltzer writes, “More so than just about any other sub-field, the digital humanities possess the capability to invigorate humanities instruction in higher education and to reassert how the humanities can help us understand and shape the world around us.” DH doesn’t need to stop at humanities. It’s important to have that emphasis there, for the “learning for the sake of learning” and “lifelong learning” aspects of a humanities-driven education may become idioms of the recent past when still yet other disciplines can benefit from the tools DHers employ. For instance, teaching with DH concepts could become a gateway to future STEM interests and Open Access awareness. DH as a gateway drug, perhaps?

I almost wish DH had been instead titled “Interventionists”**. Academia needs a lot of creative intervention before true change can take place. Beginning the process in instruction is an excellent place to start as long as the institution supports the mission completely. That is to say, the process of instruction isn’t as wrapped up in the bottom line as publishing for tenure, and perhaps the trickle down effect of emphasizing digital technologies within traditional analysis can bring change overall.

*I believe this situation was mentioned in one of our first classes, and with good reason for the current design. If the AC is going toward the greater goal of community based digital collaboration, then I would argue that the place would need to evolve away from social media (i.e.: profiles and resumes, friendships, meeting announcements) to a platform that is used in undergraduate coursework and within workshops. A repository to instruct on new technologies and collaborate for pedagogical purposes. I imagine it being used as we are I’m DH praxis, but more widely (even within the GC).

**While the name “The Interventionists” is already taken, the concepts remain in tact to appropriate it for DH here: creative disruption.

REFERENCES

Gold, Matthew K., ed. Debates in the digital humanities. U of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Hirsch, Brett D., ed. Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics. Vol. 3. Open Book Publishers, 2012.

Pedagogy vs. Research: Possibilities Beyond Hierarchical Approaches

As Steve Brier’s “Where’s the Pedagogy” demonstrates in its appraisal of CUNY’s diverse digital humanities and reform projects, “digital pedagogy projects and strategies offer an alternative pathway to broaden the impact of the digital humanities movement,” and in part are able to do so because they negotiate the relationship between traditionally-conceived academic research and university pedagogy practices.

I’d assert that the distinction between research and pedagogy, and the values attached to each of these activities at the institutional level, is central to the discussion of how we collate and disseminate information at the foundational level of digital scholarship. Broadly conceived today, the relationship between teaching and research is often viewed as hierarchical, whereby teaching functions to facilitate “new or better research” (Mahony and Pierazzo). The idea that instruction should predicate research seems to not only useful, but necessary: teaching creates the groundwork to understand theoretical and methodological practices, to use them correctly, and to produce scholarship that is meaningful, accurate, and relevant.

However, the conception of teaching–>research can easily place teaching in a subservient position, especially when viewed in the round with labor and educational policy practices. Service-related labor in the university structure (the “ugly stepchildren,” to use Steve’s term) such as classroom instruction, course design, and even committee service or community organization, often receives significantly less attention in coursework topics, job applications, and even consideration for tenure. This privileging of research over instruction at R1 institutions has vast structural consequences for expectations of both students and instructors of undergraduate and graduate education, as well as definitions of academic labor and reasonable work expectations. Katherine Harris’s idea of teaching as “invisible labor” even extends to the other arms of the university that facilitate research, and the invisibility of this labor can be attributed to complex structural issues as Roxane Shirazi (at CUNY!) discusses in her excellent blog on feminized labor, librarianship, and DH.

There’s a lot to unpack in the concept of this hierarchical labor system of teaching and research—what effect does this have on students? How does this connect to the rise of adjunct labor and its invisibility? To what extent does emphasizing the false dichotomy of research and pedagogy create structural inequities in academic labor? Or equal pay? However, I hope you’ll forgive me if I leave those questions for discussion, and shift gears to address how the digital humanities have tended to position themselves on this debate (according to this week’s syllabus readings).

I’ve noticed thus far that the digital humanist approach to pedagogy and research offers a less hierarchical structure in its very acknowledgement that pedagogy, rather than research products (books, projects, articles), shapes the field to some extent. Perhaps this is caused in part by how quickly the field is transforming—there’s just not time to publish books, peer-reviewed articles, and traditional research projects with the old publication models. Perhaps also, digital humanities believe that the field itself is shaped by pedagogical practices and not just the research products that they spark. That is, the teaching environments that Mahoney and Pierazzo describe are not just a means to creating digital humanities—they help to define it. As Tanya Clement’s observes in “Multiliteracies in the Undergraduate Digital Humanities Curriculum,” “any program that identifies itself as digital humanities is in fact inflected by a version of digital humanities that is situational and irreproducible.” These programs are situational and irreproducible because they are humanistic pedagogical experiences, and perhaps even research projects in and of themselves.

When the classroom is a research project, then, how does this change the relationship between pedagogy and research? Can research inform instruction, and instruction inform research? Sure–but I think that digital humanities pedagogical practice often transcends the idea of permeable boundaries or a mere back-and-forth model. Can we theorize a new pedagogy/research hybrid, particularly in light of newer collaborative publishing platforms?

As ever, no firm answers yet, and looking forward to discussion,

Mary Catherine.

Twitter Workshop Overview/Sept. 30th

Hi –
In class last week I suggested that we might want to share overviews from the workshops here since not all of us can make the Thursday evening DH workshops.

I suggest we keep these reports broad in scope and brief in text. Here’s my overview of the twitter workshop last week.

The workshop format was pretty informal. Approximately 12 students sat at computer lab portals in the subbasement library while we perused the twitter-sphere.
*(Make a note) Some of these labs are only accessed through the library, not the main elevators.

The teaching fellows (is ‘fellows’ the masculine use of the word?) flipped through various accounts demonstrating how twitter can increase your profile on the web.
For example: If you have a common name, your name may be associated with several people on the search engines, including criminals. To mitigate this, think of distinguishing yourself by adding a middle initial to your name and tweeting often to raise your visibility. Go to google. Search your name. See what comes up.
We noticed that Micki Kaufman got a big burst of twitter attention by way of a recent sharing of information and images. Congrats.
Suddenly one can become a “Twitter Star” as in the case of many prominent professors who have written books and have a great number of followers. In these cases a great many more people may be following you, than you are following.
Check out platforms like Hootsuite if you want to schedule your tweets ahead of time, put all your social platforms in one place, and measure your social media results
I’m attaching a twitter quick tips sheet here. It was for an event a year ago, but if you substitute #DHpraxis14 as the hashtag, and our classmates twitter handles (their accounts) to your tweets, you can use this good and simple guide to make some practical twitter sense.

Good Luck!
And, FYI – you do not need to be a twitter fan to have a small amount of success. I don’t really “love” twitter, but I “do” it, simply because its part of the digital world in which we live.

Maps, Bus Tours, Subject Headings

When I started on the Maps chapter of Moretti’s book, I immediately thought of my recent search for a literary map. I am a fan of Sara Paretsky’s series of V.I. Warshawski novels, which are hard-boiled detective fiction. There are 16 books (and two short stories) and they are rooted very strongly in Chicago. Throughout the series there are descriptions of not only the places V.I. goes, but also how she gets there—the route she drives, the trains she takes. Some of the places are fictional, but many are real.

As I was planning a recent trip to Chicago, I wanted to see a map of V.I.’s places overlaid on an actual map of Chicago. I did find one, although it only has 15 points on it, chosen seemingly at random from a handful of books. It was interesting, but not nearly as thorough as I wanted it to be.

Unlike Moretti’s diagram maps, I was originally looking for a cartographic map. On p. 56, Moretti says he did not want to “superimpose” his diagrams on geographic maps because “geometry ‘signifies’ more than geography.” I started thinking about what my (imagined) V.I. Chicago map would look like as a diagram, and what it might show.

Paretsky deals explicitly with issues of class, race and gender in the series. V.I. grew up in a tough working class neighborhood and then ‘escaped’ the neighborhood by going to the private University of Chicago on scholarship. She is an abortion-rights activist, and many of her cases revolve around white collar crime. She often investigates on behalf of out of work factory and construction workers, undocumented immigrants, and prisoners. How (if at all) would these issues reveal themselves on a geometric map?

In his maps, Moretti sees the way industrialization and state formation have changed the shape of literary idylls (p.64). Would a geometric map or diagram of V.I.’s locations show or mirror Chicago’s change from a manufacturing city to a financial services city? What would the geometry of each book look like, and what would the geometry of the entire series taken as a whole look like?

ETA: The publication dates are between 1982-2013. V.I. (& presumably Chicago) age in ‘real time’, so the landscape of 1982 Chicago in the series is different from the 2013 landscape.

—

Thinking of literary maps where imagined and real places coexist got me to thinking about eversion and bus tours. Sex and the City location tours take you to actual locations the fictional characters visited—Magnolia Bakery, ABC Carpet & Home. A similar Girls tour is being planned, and there are plenty of others–Twilight tour anyone? The way in which people meld fiction and reality in their own lives isn’t specific to the internet/cyberspace realm.

—

In Macroanalysis, Matthew Jockers says that Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH) are a rich source of data to be mined. I agree! He is referring to the bibliographic metadata assigned to titles as a way to explore literary history (p. 35), but the subject headings on their own are also a source of data for librarians. Subject headings as data to be studied is near and dear to my heart—I wrote my library school thesis on LCSH and gender bias.

The LCSH scheme is the largest general indexing vocabulary in English, and has become the most widely used controlled vocabulary for subject cataloging in the United States. LCSH aims to be objective and use neutral language, but has been criticized for displaying bias on a wide variety of topics. There is a rich history of examining subject headings and their ostensible objectivity, starting with Sanford Berman in 1971. Hope Olson (who is one of my big research crushes) argues that LCSH “enunciates the authority of the dominant patriarchal, Euro-settler culture” (2000, p. 54).

At the time of my thesis (2011—not that long ago!) I wasn’t aware of the availability of computational analysis tools. At the time I did a basic textual analysis of a fairly small set of headings. Had I known about computational tools, I might have chosen a different/larger/more diverse data set to start with. What, if any, different conclusions might I have drawn from a computational approach?

As always, more questions than answers!

References

Olson, H. A. (2000). Difference, culture and change: The untapped potential of LCSH. Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, 29(1), 53-71.

Theorizing Motherhood In DH

This week I am requesting permission to create an Individualized MALS degree that combines Digital Humanities with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The purpose of this combined major is to weave DH praxis (theory and practice) and feminist maternal perspectives into a thesis project that identifies “Mother Studies” as potential new area of inter-disciplinary coursework within the academy.

As we all know (here in this class and on the blog) — Digital Humanities is a relatively new field that is currently exploring its relevance, theory, and action. “Attempts to define the digital humanities represents a foray into contested terrain” (Matthew Gold, Digital Humanities), and yet DH has been successful in a) accessing funding, b) perpetuating a discussion of itself, c) offering classes at universities around the world. While MOOCS are just one arena where DH exercises its muscle, there is much to explore that could be useful in examining and developing “Mother Studies.” A few of those platforms are: interactive texts (such as the ones featured on the Commons), feminist archives, online exhibits, and projects like UCLA’s Hypercities; which could facilitate a mapping of history that includes aspects of HERstory (populations that have not been included in normative discussions of the recorded past. See also, Cold Spring Harbor Library.

If Digital Humanities offers a glimpse into theory and practice of “Mother Studies,” then the starting place for accessing content will be drawn from existing sources in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies literature, popular culture, and identity politics. These things shaped the feminist movement(s) of the sixties, seventies, and eighties and have continued to inform subsequent generations of procreators. GC’s own Barbara Katz Rothman has been writing about birth and motherhood since the 1980s. I suggest multiple perspectives can be added as theoretical and material resources expand to include a social, philosophical, psychological, economic, and global discussion as it pertains to m/otherhood, fatherhood, and family study.

An examination into “Mother Studies” is the logical symbolic daughter of the ever expanding, and microscoping feminist discourse. In 2011 Sage Publishing released The Encyclopedia of Motherhood. The three-volume work included feminist arts organizations, activist agencies, and academics spearheading new work about motherhood. At the same time here in New York City I began a three-year museum project on the Upper East Side. The Museum of Motherhood focused on exploring and exhibiting academic and artistic works about women, mothers, and families.

Intellectuals who believe this subject has merit have laid much groundwork. In conclusion, by combining Digital Humanities with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies I aim to construct my thesis project interactively. I will take an interdisciplinary approach to shaping the theory and practice of “Mother Studies” by a) pulling from existing sources, b) engaging the academic “collective,” c) establishing a framework with which to view the topic as a scholarly endeavor, b) utilizing DH theory and tools to enhance evaluation and discussion.

*Photo credit:

Photo Credit:
Company: TBWA\, SPAIN, Madrid
Executive Creative Director: Guillermo Gines and Juan Sanchez
Creative Director: Bernardo Hernandez
Copywriter: Vicente Rodríguez
Art Director: Bernardo Hernández and Ely Sánchez
Account Supervisor: Inés DIaz-Casariego
Advertiser’s Supervisor: Criistina Infante and Jorge Huguet
Photographer: Sara Zorraquino
Producer: Nuria Mazarío
The Outdoor Advert titled UMBILICAL CORD was done by Tbwa\ advertising agency for brand: Sony Playstation in Spain. It was released in the Apr 2007. Business sectors are: Cannes 2007 Press Bronze, Cannes 2007 Press, Point of Purchase posters.

Eversion, Conversion and the Role of DH?

As I was reading ‘Eversion’ by Steven Jones, I couldn’t help but engage the subject with my personal experiences in South Korea, where I was born and raised, until I moved to New York in 2007. South Korea has the fastest average internet connection speed (AICS) in the world. In a report by Akamai Technologies in 2014, South Korea recorded 21.9mbps AICS with an average of 68.5mbps at peaks speeds, which is almost twice as fast as Japan (2nd) and China (3rd). AICS in the U.S. recorded 10.0mbps, which has generally improved over the past few years. (http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2014/04/23/u-s-10th-in-average-internet-speed-rankings-s-korea-still-no-1/) I still clearly remember the emergence of the internet, and its development to its current ultra-high-speed broadband service in Korea, which is why I could relate the reading to my experiences. The reading raised the question: What is the relationship between the internet speed (based on broadband service) and eversion?”

I was about 12 years old, which was approximately 1997, when I first noticed that my classmates and friends were consistently going to a place called PC Bahng (literally a computer room).” As soon as school ended, students ran off to PC rooms near school. I was never drawn to video games, but I too visited these rooms to meet with my friends. My first impression was not so pleasurable. It was a small, smoky dark room with rows of computers lined next to each other, facing the wall. There was also a huge stack of routers by which high-speed internet was made possible. A bunch of teenagers in their school uniforms were playing “Role-playing games”, like Warcraft and Starcraft, or “Simulation games,” mostly involving warfare. Regardless of the genre, I noticed something they shared in common; gamers were communicating with each other through online “chat rooms”. Besides the games, cyber chatting had become very popular among the students. Often times, online chatting would lead to in person meeting, which became socially controversial. In this respect, “eversion” was already occurring in South Korea, Yet, most adults viewed using computers as distraction until then. The culture of PC rooms, however, was much more prevalent than the adults had imagined. Despite the skepticism, the numbers of PC rooms have increased tremendously, and have become hyper-mature, mainly for its monetary value (it became the most promising entrepreneurial opportunity), and soon I could see PC rooms on every other block. It had become ubiquitous in a couple years since its emergence. With its expansion, adults’ perceptions on internet had gradually changed in a positive way. They started to see the possibility of productive uses of internet for education. Consequently, AICS in Korea had become even faster around 2001. People were able to play their video games at home without experiencing any connection issues. The only reason students continued to visit PC rooms was to keep their parents from finding out that they were playing games. However, the development of high-speed broadband internet service did not occur autonomously. The Korean government started its subsidy on high-speed-internet from 1995, and by 1999, 10 million people were using the internet. It was only a little less than one quarter of the entire population. Also, with the government’s support, Korean mega-corporation, represented by Samsung, L.G., SK Telecom and etc., started investing a preponderance of money and dominating this industry.

Around 2000 or 2001, a good portion of high school students possessed mobile phones, and the mobile connection speed was significantly advanced as well. Soon, virtually every area was provided with cellular data and WiFi service. People were even able to stream online television on their phones underground on subway stations and even in trains, and this was nearly twelve years ago. In comparison, New York has just started to provide WiFi in select train stations, and is still unable to provide connection in most areas underground. Already by this time in Korea, noticeably less people read books or newspapers in the trains, and more people looked at their mobile phones, playing video games, watching TV shows and messaging their friends. When I visited Korea in 2008, I remember I was quite surprised to see people video chat so casually on their cell phones without any kind of lag, even in high-resolution. Independent Korean IT companies have developed their own search engines and blogs, represented by NAVER(http://www.naver.com/), which, according to Korean people, is still used more frequently than Google in South Korea. I also noticed that popular social media platforms in the United States, like Twitter and Facebook were unable to gain the same popularity in South Korea. This is because Korea has developed their own media platforms and systems which they believe to be more effective and ergonomic. South Korea currently seems to be rather “converted” than “everted”. The people’s daily lives heavily depend on the internet; they are simply lost without it. According to CNN’s article, In 2010, 94% of the population has access to high-speed in South Korea (http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/31/broadband.south.korea/). Except for their times of labor and sleep (although most times they use computers at work), they spend their lives online via their computers, tablets or phones. Socializing, entertaining, cultural or intellectual cultivating, and etc. all happen online these days. To me, it seems like its world’s leading AICS and the characteristic of the citizens (which I need to talk about) resulted this converted phenomena. The mixed reality has become replaced by the substitute reality. They’ve created alternative egos and personas in their cyberworld (or rather the real world to them) with different social que and culture, feeling more comfortable and secure than when they are in the external world. It seems their actuality is compromised by the virtuality; it’s converted. Another interesting concept is that the public spaces are not limited for public usage anymore. As long as people have computers or phones, the public areas become their private/personal (online)spaces. Korean citizens mostly communicate via texting and messaging. I’ve met a number of young people who claim that they experience a slight phobia of speaking on the phone or having conversation in person, especially when speaking strangers. The youth in South Korea have difficulties speaking formally because they are so accustomed to communicating through a specific manner and abbreviations commonly used online. Soon people began to use these terms and abbreviations while their conversations in the real world. At first, it seemed to be started as a joke, but over the past few years, it’s become quite common to speak, especially among younger generation, in this manner.

Instead of looking at the history behind IT development in South Korea to me, it seems more imperative to analyze the socio-economic influences that results from it. South Korea, from my experience as a native, is a highly implicit, domesticated, and conformed society. The people tend to be very self-conscious about different opinions or lifestyles as opposed to the norm. Being “different” means often times being “wrong”. For the same reason, debating culture is an alienated concept among the general public and even among intellectuals and politicians. The education system and pedagogy are heavily geared to recitation and memorization, rather than a more progressive and creative form of learning. The people consider art as a substitute to scholarship. Their prejudices and stereotypes overpower their rationality, conformity is a virtue, critical thinking is a vice, the efficacy of the humanities is ignored, and women are still repressed in a patriarchal society as they are objectified as (sexual)commodity in the media. Additionally, the gap between the minority of opulent and the majority of the rest continues to increase. What i’m trying to say is, due to the characteristics of their repressed culture, as the cyberspace has prevailed among their lives, Koreans have been developed cultic and almost dogmatic cultures in their online world. Most major online platforms including social media have been dominated by vulgar talks and series of meaningless images among citizens. Online platforms and mobile phone applications emancipated their regressed emotions and expressions. We can also look at the phenomenon in a psychological lens, and it seems quite plausible to say it is a neurotic symptom that is massively and gradually emerged among the general public in Korea, prompted by their long-time-repression, and released by the advent of the anonymous world of cyberspace. And as I’ve foreseen, fanatic culture in South Korea has become like a secularized religion to the point where watching a bunch of almost naked 16-year-old girls dance to the psychedelic songs on a television and internet has become the norm. Even more shocking thing is they export this culture to other parts of Asia (now even in Europe and America), supported by the government, saying “It’s our great cultural asset.” I see it’s no different from subsidized exported pornography. It is, so-called, K-pop. Slovenian marxist philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, once warned Korean people about the danger of undermining quality of K-pop and trance music during his visit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8kzbsT8e_k – It starts at 14:00). However, this kind of political topic, unfortunately, does not usually disseminate on their online platforms. Even if it does, they’ve lost the objective and critical eyes to look at political issues.

Although I point to these extreme cases of conversion in South Korea, this phenomena is present in many other cultures, varied by the distribution of the internet technology. An everted world seems irresistible. The problem is how we can deviate this subversive culture into a productive and progressive one. In my opinion, not because I’ve been taking this class, but I think Digital Humanities is the key to it. Utilizing advanced internet technologies and channeling people’s conforming characteristic to the interest in academia would be a great challenge of DH to accomplish. We can also utilize digital platforms to replace the old reciting and implicit education system (especially for the case of Korea) to a discursive one, provoking participations from the students who are more comfortable on the online platforms. Practices and discussions online will draw more attentions from the young students. And, of course, the primary nature of DH, egalitarian pedagogy will be necessary for this process so the students from various fields (including myself) such as art and design have more opportunities to be involved with interdisciplinary praxis, collaborating with the students from the scholarly fields.

Can Feminists Find DH Helpful?

Yup. I dove into the pool and didn’t check to see how deep the water was.

I’m still afloat, but holding my breath.

LYNDA.com is playing in the background. (S)he’s a man talking code, programming the new language of my life — and I’m not sure exactly what (s)he’s saying?

The twitter copy of tags is a little mysterious too. #InTheDarkAges #TwitterHelp #JustKidding #DHfeminist (There’s one tweet)

The “theory” of DH inspires me. Materially speaking, I’m sure most everyone in the group heard about the 3D printed car? (LINK to the story). I probably don’t need to say why it’s relevant, but I will. This technology rests at the intersection of exactly what we have been exploring in the theory and practice of DH.

I’ve been playing with some of this theory in my area of interest to see how DH might facilitate theorizing “New Maternalisms” and “Mother Studies.” I know it seems like a weird combo, but that’s how I got into all of this — A MOOC course out of Minnesota State last summer taught by feminist Jocelyn Fenton Stitt that set me on my current course.

The ways information can be digitized and shared across platforms seems like an amazing opportunity. That possibility includes disseminating valuable education to people who are performing caregiving work in institutional and private settings. We DO believe education makes our lives “more informed” if not “betta” — right?

So why not apply some “maternal thinking’ (Sara Ruddick) to an “emerging politics of peace,” and every other damn thing that really matters. Like, raising the next generation of DH’ers? Can feminists find DH helpful? I’m finding out! Here’s an interesting article on “Assessing Feminist Interventions In Digital Archives.”

Swimming slowly, but I’m doin’ it. As usual, before I found out how much I didn’t know, I felt pretty smart. (Sigh)

There’s a lot of money in Twitter archives. Also, a Data-Driven Look at #gamergate

On September 3rd, #gamergate was the top trending tag on Twitter. This is an impressive feat for several reasons:

1) It was Beyonce’s birthday. #happybirthdaybeyonce was only the SECOND most popular tag.

2) It was in no way related to mainstream media.

3) It’s not a fun hashtag.

The tag #gamergate refers to a discussion happening between game developers, journalists, and enthusiasts following a series of events Erik Kahn concisely explains in GamerGate: A Closer Look At The Controversy Sweeping Video Games.

To state it briefly, ex-boyfriend of game developer Zoe Quinn wrote a blog post claiming Zoe had slept with members of the press for positive coverage on her new game, Depression Quest. Following this, Zoe gets doxxed, (that is, her public information is released online maliciously), and she begins getting harassed. If it were typical harassment, that would be awful, but she receives several death threats, so it’s even worse. Several members of the gaming community stood up to defend Zoe, and bad things begin to happen to them as well. Phil Fish, developer of indie darling, Fez, and owner of Polytron has his Twitter account hacked and the Polytron website is taken over by hackers. This leads to Fish deleting his Twitter account and declaring that he no longer wishes to be associated with the games industry, or its fans. Dan Golding explains in his piece “The End of Gamers“:

Campaigns of personal harassment aimed at game developers are nothing new. They are dismayingly common among those who happen to be women, or not white straight men, and doubly so if they also happen to make the sort of game that in any way challenge the status quo, even if that challenge is only made through their very existence. The viciousness and ferocity with which this campaign occurred, however, was shocking, and certainly out of the ordinary. This was something more than routine misogyny (and in games, it often is routine, shockingly). It was an ugly spectacle that should haunt and shame those involved for the rest of their lives.

Several other publications chimed in, including Kotaku, Gamasutra, and Polygon. Later that week, Host of gaming vlog, Feminist Frequency posts a piece titled Women as Background Decoration. The threats she receives following this are so direct she is forced from her home.

Despite the large number of publications cited so far, a large bulk of the discussion unfolded on Twitter under the #gamergate hashtag. I have compiled a public archive of several thousand tweets using the tag #gamergate using TAGS here:

Public Archive (Please be patient, it’s a large doc!)

TAGS Explorer: A Visual Representation of the Twitter Conversation (please wait for it to load!)

The conversation was happening so quickly, every time TAGS retrieved Tweets from Twitter, it would freeze and become inaccessible for hours as it compiled the archive. That said, these tweets were collected over the course of two weeks, often hundreds at time, between September 1st and September 10th. Weeks later, and #GamerGate is still receiving roughly 100 tweets per minute. I have met the limit on the size of my archive, but if anyone is well-versed in google docs and spreadsheets, I would love some assistance moving tweets into a new sheet so that I can continue compiling tweets. Please contact me ASAP.

Observations:

•Related hashtag, #notyourshield, appears 1021 times throughout the 4000 tweets archived. #notyourshield is a tag that is supposed to be used by under-represented members of the gaming community, namely women, minorities, and LGBT, who claim that primary video game media outlets discuss the representation poorly, and often in place of the real issues (such as collusion between game developers and press).

•”SJW” appears 375 times throughout 4000 tweets archived. SJW is short for “Social Justice Warrior” a pejorative term for those who defend the rights of under-represented groups online.

•”Journal” (for journalism and journalist) appears 517 times.

• “fem” appears 350 times.

•”Destiny” appears 140 times. Around the time these tweets were compiled, Destiny was on the verge of being released. Many tweets using this tag expressed that the release of Destiny would not slow the discussion circulating around #gamergate. This ended up being true.

•”Quinn” appears 365 times.

•”Phil Fish” appears 45 times.

•”Polygon” appears 475 times. This is the name of a publication that is outspoken against the doxxing of Zoey Quinn, and has many well known and respected female writers on staff. At one point, many were Tweeting that Polygon was banning users on their discussion boards speaking out against Anita Sarkeesian.

•”Kotaku” appears 291 times. Zoe Quinn was implicated for having relations with a writer who worked for this publication.

• 85% of posters identify as male.

•58% of posters are from the US.

• 68.1% of posts are made from a Desktop computer. 14.2% from an iPhone, 10.9% from Android devices.

•64.6% of posts are re-tweets. 12.5% are replies. 23% are original posts

Issues with Archiving:

Using a data tool, I discovered that as of this post over 775,000 tweets have been tagged with #GamerGate. If my 4000 tweets seemed like a large set of data, I am sorry to disappoint. I found a service called HashTracking that would retrieve the full history for me, but it would cost 2.00$ for every 1,000 tweets… so… more money than I have. Another service, Keyhole, offers a real-time view of the hashtag over several social media platforms at once. They also offer historical archives, beginning at 49$. I am currently waiting on them to send me a quote on the cost of my 775k tweet archive. If it’s not over 200$, I will probably suck it up and pay… but I won’t like it.

That said, KEYHOLE IS AMAZING. If you did not click the link to Keyhole above CLICK THIS NOW. Unfortunately, they only offer a 3-day trial; an actual account starts at 130$/mo. You might notice the link I’ve provided dates between August 30th and September 2nd. Because of this, their keyword spread is much different than mine, with the top related tag being #justgamingjournothings.

The biggest problem with archiving this set of tweets is that it’s such a large, unwieldy, and lively set of data. For three weeks it’s been twisting, turning, busy, and relevant. Clearly others have also had difficulty retrieving and dissecting data from Twitter, which is why services like Keyhole and Hashtracking exist, and charge such high rates. Furthermore, as the #gamergate discussion has been going on for roughly three weeks now, looking at a 4000 tweet snapshot of data may not be good enough. In fact, looking at any dataset smaller than the whole thing might not be good enough. My goal is to capture, compile, and dissect the whole event, and because it has taken weeks to unfold, to capture anything smaller than its absolute form would be an injustice… but who has 1500$ to pay for a set of tweets? A big business maybe, not me. Sure, one could work within the limitations of Google Docs, constantly moving the data into new spreadsheets whenever the need arises… but from August 30th and September 2nd, 100,000 tweets were posted. A spreadsheet fills up in 4000, meaning that in 3 days, you would need to edit your script 20 times to take into account new archives, and there’s no doubt that some data would fall between the cracks considering the archival tool would freeze for hours sometimes when updating, therefore archiving a set of data this large using free, easy to use tools would be more than just a full-time job, it would be impossible.

What’s Next?

There are certainly more things that I want to try out with TAGS. I could certainly see how it would be useful to track a smaller conversation, such as our class tag, #dhpraxis14 . I DO plan to find a way to access the entire archive of tweets for #gamergate, as I believe that it might be of some significance later on.

While I do not think this is the place to post my full opinions on the subject, I agree with Dan Golding, who states that the term “gamer” and the connotations behind it are dying. Jesper Juul alludes as early as 2010 in Casual Revolution (which Steven Jones referenced in ch. 1 of his book, which we read this week), whether they be on a mobile devices or on Facebook, that everyone plays games now. We don’t need a word for “gamer” in the same way that we do not need a word for one who reads books or watches films. Creating this kind of terminology has the possibility to create lines of division between those who “do” and those who “do not”. Either way… don’t we need a pristine, complete archive of that? Should I pass around a donation jar?

Data vs. Capta

Hello, all,

Here is Johanna Drucker’s piece, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” that I mentioned in class.

In her abstract, Drucker argues that ” the concept of data as a given has to be rethought through a humanistic lens and characterized as capta, taken and constructed.” In doing so, I feel that she helps to establish what is unique about humanities computing–that it is not computer science and humanistic study on different sides of the same coin, but rather an integration of concepts from both disciplines.

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html

Digital Praxis Seminar Fall 2014 – Spring 2015