I left THATcamp Louisiana both energized and underwhelmed. My response to the event, like the “unconference” itself, is a bit scattered:

• I was really surprised how well coming up with a schedule of sessions as a group worked. It seemed like a magical moment of collaboration. That said, it was often unclear who was “leading” the sessions I attended. I often suspected that the people who would have been most suited to do so were attending other sessions that they wanted to learn from. Without a clear idea of who would lead each session or how many people might speak/present/attend, I felt an acute sense of FOMO — that I was missing out on a really great session next door. THATcamps employ the “Law of Two Feet” but there were too few attendees for me to simply leave a session without being rude.
• Although I really appreciate the democratic principles behind THATcamps, I felt that the ratio of people who were “interested in learning more about this dh thing” to experienced dh-ers was off. In most of the sessions I attended, I felt as though there were few people present who had hands-on experience with the topic–or, if there were, they kept quiet while the rest of us traded recommendations for websites whose names we’d forgotten.
• I think that most of the lackluster parts of the conference stemmed from its low attendance. The organizers clearly put a lot of work and passion into it, but it seems like it would have been more productive with, say, 30 more people in attendance.
• The lunch was really good.

I loved Lauren Klein’s talk and workshop. I had a few big takeaways from her talk:

• That we can look to the past to come up with better ways to incorporate technology into humanities research.
• Sometimes, visualizations should be difficult to understand.
• Relatedly, that the body still has a place in dh. The experience of interacting with, say, a floor-sized visualization can be vastly different than looking at projection that’s the same size.
• We should look everywhere we can to develop technologies and approaches that are humanistic on a deep level rather than simply adaptable to our general purposes.

I’ve posted a link to my final project along with a short write-up on my blog. If you’d prefer to go straight to the database, it’s available to view and download on Google Docs.

Jeremy and my website is below:

https://dsl.lsu.edu/courses/engl7221s16/queercrip/

Thank you!

“Next Steps in Text Mining” with John Laudun:

I attended John Laudun’s workshop on text mining on March 6. For the workshop, he lead our group on how to use Python programming language. We used the platform Anaconda in order to experiment with text mining. After doing our in-class exercise using Voyant, I was simultaneously a bit lost and impressed with the capabilities of using Python. Laudun walked us through a using Anaconda to text mine a corpus of Jane Austen’s major novels. It was interesting to see the different results and comparing them to the results from Voyant. He walked us through one example of the results, which laid out frequencies of words in Austen’s novels, but instead of displaying them as a word cloud, it displayed them in an arrangement where they appear in the text, which provided for context for each word by showing the words that appear around them. This provided a different context for the frequency of words in a corpus as opposed to only having them arranged in a graph or, again a word cloud like we played with in class on Voyant. I also was able to partially use this approach with Paul Laurence Dunbar and spoke to John after class and ended up emailing him about how to create a dataset from the Paul Laurence Dunbar digital archive at Wright State University. So helpful in multiple ways!

“Historical GIS Workshop: Mapping the Great Plains Population” with Geoff Cunfer:

I attended the Historical GIS Workshop on April 15. At the beginning of the workshop, Geoff Cunfer gave an excellent breakdown of what GIS is: “Geographic Information Systems,” which he defined as “computer based system for assembling, storing, manipulating, analyzing, and displaying data.” He walked everyone through the specifics of what constitutes GIS mapping programs and how they are assembled. He separated data into two separate types: map data and attribute data. He explained map data as “information about spatial location,” which is described in computer files by latitude-longitute on x-y coordinates. There are three separate map features: polygons, lines, and points. Attribute date is the information about place, for example population of countries (polygons), speed limits of roads (lines), and elevation of cities (points). In historical GIS, you use these methods to answer historical questions and to analyze historical sources. For the workshop portion, we used the program Arcmap to look at a map of the great plains regions — if I remember right, we looked at Minnesota. We played with the different functions of how to generate different population data when manipulating the data and were able to look for specific data about the population of the state based on different demographics at different points in history.

I attended 3 of LSU’s DSL DH workshops (not including the events we attended as a class)- Getting Started in the Digital Humanities, Introduction to Text Mining, and Next Steps in Text Mining. Reflecting on these workshops along with the visualization talk and workshop we attended as a class, what’s foregrounded is the constant tension between thinking and talking about digital work versus the hands-on, getting done of digital work. I appreciate that this year’s DSL workshops offered opportunities along that spectrum of “hack and yack” (the and instead of an or).

Hello all,

You can find my final project here.

Enjoy, and thanks!

Trusted friends and colleagues,

Find my final project, Here Come the Snails here. I hope that you all find it as enjoyable to read as I found it to build. I wish you all the very best.

-Alex

My undergraduate education was focused in Anthropology. Anthro has it’s own long, unique history of abusive practice, of taking cultural artifacts and using them as display tools, entertainment, or proof of the superiority of certain cultures. This project reminded me of a lot of what I saw in my undergraduate career, of the ways that researchers often don’t think of the full political implications of their work. And, of how they’re reproducing certain structures by moving to the world of the digital. I think this exemplifies how the digital, branded as new and transformative, can also play into these methods of imperialism, and create elite communities for cultural viewing.

The presenter at Virtual Musical Instruments began talking about the “African thumb piano”, which he later admitted was not was not what it was supposed to be called. If I’m asked not to reproduce colonialist monikers for someone else’s creative property, I try to listen, especially if I’m in charge of a project which will categorize said tools. I looked online, and two names I have found for this instrument are the Kalimba and the Mbira. After hearing this statement, I started to think about the different ways this project was taking cultural property and transferring it to a digital sphere, where it would be separated from its context and larger social role. And, where it would be readily accessible to a specific audience.

I took a “Musical Migrations” class in undergrad, and a lot of this project troubled me in terms of music as a construct. It’s one thing to be interested in the physicality of an instrument: how it works and how it makes music. But, you can’t separate that from the cultural space which these instruments inhabit, and the dynamics of their continued existence in a colonial history. Music is more than just the tools. These instruments might be inextricably connected to different religious rites, community practice, the people who work to continue on the traditions musical instruments are indelibly tied to. When you put it in a computerized database, who is that really for? Are people whose cultural property this instrument belong to going to be able to use it, or even want to use it? Will they profit from it? Take part in its construction and portrayal? How are you serving those peoples from whom you take creative tools?

I think the arbitrators of this project need to think about the ethical implications of their database. What is knowledge for the sake of gathering knowledge? Who does that benefit? Imperialist cultures gather knowledge as cultural collateral, to appropriate the advancements of certain peoples and take them under their domain. I don’t think the persons in charge of this database can ignore that history, which categorizes their practice.