Week 5 Practicum: Layers of Information Hiding in Plain Sight

When we practiced using the Arc-GIS tools in our digital humanities course this week, I was already excited because I knew what the end-product could look like. I’ve seen these slick tools employed for many a New York Times multimedia story in their longer-form investigative articles. And, I have always loved maps. I don’t know if it is because I’m a very visually-minded person (while I found mathematics a difficult subject in school, geometry was my jam because I could truly “see” the equation), or because I remember growing up with many types of maps decorating our house to helps us remember the various points of origin of our multicultural household. Or, perhaps there is something that is just so elegant when complex information has to be encoded visually and the result both communicates substance but conveys a visual gravitas that remains hidden compared to the morsecode-like dots and dashes of English language text until one does a deep reading. I think a map more readily suggests a journey, whether it be an external one or a mental one. The “Spatial History Project” captures the potential of the journey neatly here: “Maps and texts are critical for representations of space, but representations of space cannot be confined to maps for a simple reason: maps and texts are ultimately static while movement is dynamic…[ARC-GIS] allows us to merge things created at dramatically different times to create what are, in effect, new modern images which potentially reveal things about the past that the original artifacts did not.”

But, maps also propagate myths when a reader does not critically examine them. As Joanna Drucker argues in her work “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Displays” there is fallacy that if something can be graphed or mapped with quantitative data inputs, then the data was precise enough to lead to an objectively factual piece of research and the analytical conclusions one might derive from it. Therefore, she argues that even as digital humanities has drawn heavily from methods in science to digitize and quantify data that is often more qualitative in nature, it is important to employ the humanist values and techniques to bear on the data representation process itself. Digital humanities is established enough to innovate on this area, and to not attempt to do so may allow viewers to take data at face value. The point is to think critically. Why not make transparent the many subjective choices that went into crunching the “objective” data? In Drucker’s words: “Bureaucracies process human activity through statistical means and when the methods grounded in empirical sciences are put at the service of the social sciences or humanities in a crudely reductive manner, basic principles of critical thought are violated, or at the very least, put too far to the side. To intervene in this ideological system, humanists, and the values they embrace and enact, must counter with conceptual tools that demonstrate humanities principles in their operation, execution, and display.” Or, as the pithy Mark Twain was quoted as saying, beware of “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

In my diplomatic subspecialty of public diplomacy, the crux of my work is in helping people understand American policy and culture with the goal of building mutually understanding and beneficial relationships for security, prosperity, and the well-being of the United States with its global family members. There are a lot of ways to  approach this goal, but a key feature is literally communicating key information. I love public diplomacy because I believe that as important as the traditional “white paper” or policy speech is (and will continue to be) a broad audience doesn’t have appetite for this things or sometimes just doesn’t follow those types of developments. So, finding cultural tools or media tools that can summarize key points in a simpler way or, frankly, a more enjoyable way, can be a crucial step to getting wider public support on things. Thus, something like the Arc-GIS map with its dynamic story-map feature that can be adapted to viewers using computers or other mobile devices is great!

For one of my other projects where I was researching other existing war and society programs to compare to Chapman University’s, I had recently co-authored a research summary where I knew a map would be really beneficial. Already, the qualitative data my colleague and I were finding showed some interesting geographic patterns in where war and society programs were. So, for the practicum, I was able to use the story-map tool to take the report I already created and distill it into a map feature. Presently, this is a draft version. What I ultimately aim to do is layer in more information that I am still researching to see, for example, how many of these programs are specifically located close to certain military or diplomatic institutions, or other “neighbors” that may suggest why, for example, there are more war and society programs east of the Rockies than on the West Coast, or perhaps those “neighbors” inform how that school’s war and society curriculum is focused.

In the technical creation of this project, I found that while the story map tool appears like an easy, idiot-proof template, it truly is the definition of a basic tool. It only reflects back the potential of an interesting narrative based on well-filtered data the author puts into it. For example, while there are many layers of maps one can borrow from, I still had to spend a decent amount of time putting my data into a spreadsheet to load in a format the program could work with. Also, when I input addresses, the one that was located in Wales, UK initially showed up in Colorado for some reason. So, in reviewing and correcting the data, I realized the program probably has a built-in American address bias, reflecting that it is a program probably developed in the United States.

I remember once when I was working as an English teacher in China how many of students there very explicitly noted that English was a must in order to really access the full potential of the Internet. And, given the de facto digital economy capital of Silicon Valley is in the United States, it made me think more about what the experience of a non-English speaking user of the internet in the early days might have been like. More interestingly, given how many computer scientists and engineers (even those working in the United States) seem to come from China and India now coupled with many more platforms that have been developed and grown in the Chinese market (WeChat, Weibo, TikTok, etc.) I wonder if the internet experience will be moving into a language other than English sooner rather than later. Will “first mover advantage” maintain for the long run? We shall see…

Works Cited:

“Spatial History Project.” Accessed March 4, 2021. http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29.

Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 005, no. 1 (March 10, 2011).