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.    

I went to the GIS Mapping event at the Digital Scholarship Lab with Andrew Sluyter. I initially attended because I wanted to work in different medium (sound, visual, etc.) when it comes to my poetry, and exploring these different visual tools has been part of that process.

I think the mapping system could be really interesting in making interactive poetry landscapes. I want to take into account temporal and spacial elements, as I believe this connects poetry to history, and the historical implication of poetic development.

As the presentation progressed, I learned about the different data entry methods, and how to generate various mapping systems based off that input. I think this would be cool for location poetry: creating maps with data and then implanting poetry in certain locals. I’m thinking specifically of a map which might input different legislation related to disability access: where it was enacted, what types of rulings, etc. Or articles which commented on that legislation, such as those about the ADA. And then ,I can  have poems implanted in the visual output of that data-set, set poems as part of that product, to give them context in a larger dialogue.

My poetry automatically has it’s space in this conversation. I think about the time my mother got the school to buy me a one handed keyboard, and the violin extension so I could play. About the 504 plan she signed me up for without my knowledge, which I then found out about from a teacher. My life has been impacted by this “data”, and so now I want to impact it back. Literally, physically. Put my person narrative on the larger system, give it context, and shape.   

This is only preliminary thinking. I’d be interested in any other ideas people may have about how to enact this type of project.

Although most of Olga Scrivner’s talk on “Language Variation Suite and Interactive Text Mining Suite” was somewhat over my head, it offered an interesting contrast to Lauren Klein’s talk on “Speculative Designs.” Scriver’s program is of course more in line with Playfair’s preference for clarity and accuracy than Peabody’s preference for experience. Scrivner’s goal in creating LSV was to make codes she had written more user friendly, and LSV is, in fact, fairly user-friendly for folks with some statistical knowledge.

LSV allows users to generate various visualizations and tables based on a csv import. For example, users can create a “conditional inference tree” which I understand as a more complex cluster diagram. Running the Labov data allows the user to see that R-use was most similar at Macy’s and Saks as well as the frequency of R retention and R deletion at Macy’s/Saks and Klein’s. Users can also generate a “random forest” graph, which makes the most significant variables visible.

Most people in the room seemed to know about Labov’s data. When Scrivner initially mentioned Labov, someone responded by saying “fourth floor” in a cartoonish New York accent, a joke that to me seemed so out of context as to be almost surreal. I googled Labov and quickly found out what his experiment was and why “fourth floor” was relevant, but the scene was a striking example of how a common vocabulary and canon of knowledge is often a necessary foundation for a field-specific discussion. Since literary scholars worry a lot, and rightly so, about the literary canon, I forget that other fields also have shared narratives that define the group and allow for common ground.

A tangential story: BC required its MA in English students to pass a historical placement exam that required students to place ten excerpts within a specific time period based on the form and content of the piece. The exam required extensive general knowledge, but little deep knowledge. The day before the exam I was with a group of fellow students stressing about whether we had studied enough, and one student said dryly, “Well, we’re going to host a 2-hour study group on ‘Goblin Market’ tomorrow—so we should be ready after that.” We all erupted in laughter. Field knowledge leads to very strange jokes.

I tell that story mostly because it still makes me laugh. However, it does lead me to recognize the fact that as a humanities student becoming more acquainted with digital tools, there is a certain amount of laughing along while secretly googling that I have to do, and I assume others do as well. There were years of study that led up to the immediate understanding of a “Goblin Market” joke. I don’t have years of study in computing or statistics—not many of us humanities folks do—but there is value in full-immersion language learning, in laughing along and asking questions later.

Astounding Stories Database v3
Astounding Stories Presentation Lyons

Last week I attended Lauren Klein’s talk, “Speculative Designs,” which I found engaging and thought provoking. Klein opened by asking a question about the effect of data visualization’s origin story, and then suggested that if we tell the story differently, we might approach alternative histories and new forms of visualization. Her intention was not only to explore what could have been, but what could be if we take “failed” experiments in visualization seriously.

Klein used Elizabeth Peabody’s data visualizations to exemplify a strategy that was not widely adopted, but that we can learn from. Peabody created visualizations that did not value the clear and immediate perception of data, but that were purposefully abstract and demanded sensory and experiential engagement from users and makers. Not only did Peabody create rug-sized models of her grid that potential buyers would gather around to view from different perspectives, but visualization-makers would have to painstakingly compare a list of events with a color code with a blank grid with a grid map and then make decisions about how they would represent their history—a very experiential and time consuming process.

Peabody’s story led me to reconsider my own experience creating a Neatline map this semester. Although my goal was to create a clear and easy-to-read visualization for users, actually creating the map was neither clear nor very easy. The program required me to make decisions that eventually led me to an, if not actually new, newly perceived understanding of nineteenth century print culture. I would love to find a way to provide map users with a more interactive experience, but I don’t think Neatline has that type of functionality.

This is a bit of a leap, but Klein’s talk also reminded me of the introduction to Peter Coviello’s Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America. Coviello writes of the untold possibilities for sexual identity that were ruled out by the institutionalization of sexuality, arguing that these possibilities aren’t necessarily failures, but that they actually offer avenues for the future. Coviello and Klein’s method of looking at undeveloped pasts for future possibilities is a line of thought I’d be interested in following in my own work on southern periodical publication.