Monthly Archives: April 2021

Snip Snip

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I have been crocheting since I was fourteen, and I know: every project requires the destruction of a pair of scissors.

The thing is, crocheting is making something. I take the ball of yarn, and I build it up in neat rows and patterns. But to build it, I have to break the project down, undo stitches right and left, and at the end, I need my pair of scissors to cut and tie off the yarn. My flowers, hats, scarves, and blankets were all made by ripping patterns apart and cutting yarn up, just as much as they were made by building. As Mark Sample says, destruction is necessary to learn (Sample).

In a similar vein, working on the code for Monkeys writing Shakespeare required that I break the thing to understand how it works. I already know enough code from previous experiences to understand how to troubleshoot some basic C++ and HTML, so I focused more on a problem I ran into with the code: Why couldn’t I get apostrophes to work?

I eventually realized that the variable “original_text” was set apart by apostrophes, so inserting one in the middle of the line broke the code. Fortunately, I could insert the HTML code for apostrophes, “&#x27” to add in the apostrophes to my text. I didn’t know how to fix this problem until I looked online, and found the webpage “How to create the apostrophe symbol in HTML”. Fixing this was a collaborative effort, even if my teammate at educative.com will never know me.

I was able to add in apostrophes using the internet’s help, so I could destroy Dolly Parton’s song while maintaining proper grammar.

I don’t consider myself a coder. I don’t find that joy in making codes work that I think is a requirement to really loving coding. I also don’t actually speak any coding languages; I can stumble along if I have a book next to me, but actually writing code isn’t something I have ever done well.

However, I’m not afraid of coding. And the way that coding is taught and thought about currently inspires fear. It is similar to the way math is taught; the idea that there are “math people” and “not math people” is something I have always disliked. Most people can grasp the concepts of math and coding, but these things are taught as if it is an entry to a secret, high society, that not everyone deserves entry to.

These gates that bar the way to coding are bars of privilege. Women are kept out of coding because at the first sign of trouble, they’re told “well not everyone is good at this…” and they start to believe that a B+ in class is a sign that they don’t belong. Meanwhile, boys with a C in class feel like their doing fine, because they are not told with every glance that they do not belong. Miriam Posner writes about this, saying:

“But it also makes you extremely conscious of your mistakes, confusion, and skill level. You are there as a representative of every woman. If you mess up or need extra clarification, it’s because you really shouldn’t — you suspected this anyway — you shouldn’t be there in the first place.” (Posner, Think).

I cannot speak to the experience of people of color, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was similar. Even when there are coding classes and math classes that work to overcome the barriers that keep coding so white and male, the pervasive idea that people are “coders” or “not” will continue to keep the underprivileged firmly in the “not” category.

I think, instead, we need to think about coding similarly to how we think about cooking. Not everyone is a cook. But, anyone can make toast, if they’re given a toaster, some bread, and some easy to follow instructions. We have to remove the economic barriers keeping people from toasters, and also (to strain the metaphor) remove the socialized idea that a certain group of people will burn toast every time. Let people burn their toast and break their code; it’s the first step to a great meal and a good coder.

My first crochet projects were a mess, and I certainly wasn’t branching out into creating my own patterns. But I was a crocheter as soon as I picked up a hook and started enjoying myself. Through talking with others, tearing projects apart, and practice, I got a lot better. But what mattered was the enjoyment. If a person enjoys Digital Humanities, they are a Digital Humanist – even if only through creating messy projects using software others have already made.

The only cuts that hurt more than they help, when learning something, are the ones that cut people out of the group.

 

Works Cited

“How to Create the Apostrophe Symbol in HTML.” Educative: Interactive Courses for Software Developers, https://www.educative.io/edpresso/how-to-create-the-apostrophe-symbol-in-html. Accessed 30 Apr. 2021.

Posner, Miriam. Some Things to Think about before You Exhort Everyone to Code. http://miriamposner.com/blog/some-things-to-think-about-before-you-exhort-everyone-to-code/. Accessed 30 Apr. 2021.

Posner, Miriam. » Think Talk Make Do: Power and the Digital Humanities Journal of Digital Humanities. http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/think-talk-make-do-power-and-the-digital-humanities-by-miriam-posner/. Accessed 30 Apr. 2021.

Sample, Mark. “Notes towards a Deformed Humanities.” @samplereality, 2 May 2012, https://samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/.

Shaffer, Kris. Monkeys Writing Shakespeare. https://kshaffer.github.io/monkeyswritingshakespeare/. Accessed 30 Apr. 2021.

Scalar Practicum

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In class, I made a small Scalar project on crocheting. However, I immediately learned the truth of Jessica Bocinski’s words: you need to know what you’re doing ahead of time, before starting a Scalar project.

Scalar’s page renaming system does not change what the page is called in the “recent” tab. This made my in-class project very difficult to work with, because I had accidently made two pages called “home” and they both appeared in the “recent pages” tab. This was the most frustrating thing I found about Scalar, finding pages or media once they were uploaded. Therefore, I created a new project from scratch for the practicum, where I planned ahead of time what I would need. This is a Scalar Project retelling the Agatha Christie novel “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”. I learned that Scalar is much easier to use when things are planned out ahead of times. My main difficultly in this project was ensuring the links to media all worked correctly. I learned a lot about how to create paths, which I found interesting. The pages are far from perfect, but it was fun to set up the project. I learned the difference, for example, between the image carousel and the card widget, and why each would be useful in different circumstances.

Much like the widgets, using Scalar, WordPress, or Storymaps are all useful, but in different circumstances. Scalar is a great source for telling stories with linked pages, or for museums. Storymaps and Adobe Spark, however, are good for presentations with a single page. My Storymap presentation raised a lot of interesting research questions to me, which making a similar Scalar project would not do; however, trying to tell a murder mystery through Storymaps would be a frustrating experience. WordPress’s tagging system is superior, but it is fundamentally a blogging site, without the paths that are so useful on Scalar. I am glad that we are learning all of these different tools, because each has its own use for different kinds of projects.

Scalar link again: https://scalar.chapman.edu/scalar/the-mysterious-affair-at-styles-/index?path=emily-inglethorp-has-died

Center for American War Letters Digitization Proposal

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Chapman has collected a unique archive in the Center for American War Letters (CAWL). These letters were given to Chapman with the understanding that the letters would be used for historical scholarship. In order to fulfil the trust of the donors, Chapman has an obligation to make these letters as accessible to scholars as possible. As shown in the last year with Coronavirus, accessibility often means making things available online. Even in normal times, digitization makes documents more accessible to people with low vision and to people who cannot travel to California. For these reasons, the Center for American War Letters ought to be digitized.

Digitizing these letters is not simply a matter of scanning them and running an Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR is not a perfect transcription method even for printed books (Sullivan). The handwritten letters discussed here would need to be transcribed by people. This doesn’t necessarily mean the transcription would need to take place at Chapman, however; we could follow the example of Transcribe Bentham, and attempt a crowdsourced transcription. This would require high quality photos of the letters, and a way for people online to submit their transcriptions (Ross). However, these digital commitments would be very possible, and many projects have used them successfully.

Once the letters were transcribed, they would have to be organized. We must not underestimate the task of classification; organizing by year, war, or topic must all be considered carefully (Sperberg-McQueen). We must also consider the legal ramifications, and the ongoing costs, associated with digitization. As Roy Rosenzweig writes, a process must be developed on how to treat legal matters; should letters simply be purged if there are complaints? (Rosenzweig). Chapman also must allocate money for the upkeep of the project, or else it will decay (Nowviskie and Porter).

CAWL is one of the things that makes Chapman unique; increasing its digital footprint will increase Chapman’s visibility. It would be similar to the University of Michigan’s “Michigan in the World” historical project (Michigan in the World | U-M LSA History). The investment needed to digitize these letters would be worth it. On a personal note, when writing my undergraduate thesis, I could not access a document that was in England, and written in Latin. The digitization of this document saved my thesis. I know that digitization is difficult and expensive, but it is an important part of being a research institution at this time.

 

Works Cited
Michigan in the World | U-M LSA History. https://lsa.umich.edu/history/history-at-work/michigan-in-the-world.html. Accessed 14 Mar. 2021.
Nowviskie, Bethany, and Dot Porter. “The Graceful Degradation Survey: Managing Digital Humanities Projects Through Times of Transition and Decline.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 24, no. 2, June 2009, pp. 225–33. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1093/llc/fqp009.
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” American Historical Review, vol. 108, no. 3, June 2003, pp. 735–62.
Ross, Claire. “Social Media for Digital Humanities and Community Engagement.” Digital Humanities in Practice, by Claire Warwick et al., Facet Publishing, 2012, pp. 23–45, https://eds-b-ebscohost-com.libproxy.chapman.edu/eds/ebookviewer/ebook?sid=5322476a-83c0-4a5d-a546-0dd1c3ab2a02%40pdc-v-sessmgr04&ppid=pp_23&vid=0&format=EB. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost).
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. “Classification and Its Structures.” Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture), by Susan Schreibman et al., Hardcover, Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2004, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.
Sullivan, Danny. “When OCR Goes Bad: Google’s Ngram Viewer & The F-Word.” Search Engine Land, 19 Dec. 2010, https://searchengineland.com/when-ocr-goes-bad-googles-ngram-viewer-the-f-word-59181.

Scarcity or Abundance: The Choice Must be Ours

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In the book Matched, by Allie Condie, only 100 stories, songs, and poems were preserved by the totalitarian government. Naturally, the heroine discovers a poem that the government had deemed too revolutionary to be preserved, and she is inspired by it to fight back (Condie). This book was one of many of the dystopian young adult books that were popular during my childhood, but the idea that a government would intentionally preserve some art, and destroy others, was a concept that remained with me long after I forgot the love triangle that was at the center of the book series. The difficultly of intentional preservation is that no one is without bias, leading to an abundance of proof for one side of history, and a scarcity of all else.

I ran into the problems of preservation when writing my thesis on Catholic women in the time of Elizabeth I. The records of women were often not nonexistent because of the patriarchal society, and the records of Catholics were often intentionally destroyed by the Catholics themselves, seeking to avoid persecution. This was, in some ways, a blessing; I had the opportunity to look at just about every record that has been preserved. As Roy Rosenzweig writes, “the injunction of traditional historians to look at “everything” cannot survive in a digital era in which “everything” has survived” (Rosenzweig). An important part of being a historian was working in that empty space where not everything has survived. Scarcity does not frighten me; although I wished many times in my research for more documents, I was able to focus on what did exist, and use it to make my own arguments. And this scarcity had a purpose. If every document I wished for had survived, many more people might have been murdered for their religious beliefs. The control of the preservation was in individual’s hands, and they made the choice to destroy things to protect themselves and their families.

The abundance of the internet frightens me far more, because the people who decide what to preserve often do not have the best interests of the people whose data they are preserving at heart. Some governments have considered laws on “the right to be forgotten,” which awaken a host of worries about censorship and privacy (Fleischer). Opening people’s mail without their knowledge is a federal offense; but activists worry constantly that their text messages or other internet communication will be used against them in court.

Of course, the potential scarcity of the internet worries me as well. I remember in 2017, when the Trump administration began deleting news articles about Climate Change. Rosenzweig’s comment “Future historians may be unable to ascertain not only whether Bert is evil, but also which undersecretaries of defense were evil” reminded me of this (Rosenzweig). The destruction of research for a political agenda is frightening, and the destruction on the internet carries with it an element of gaslighting. Burning a book leaves ash and a space on the shelf; editing an internet page may leave no record at all, outside of people’s memories.

My issue with the abundance of the internet is that control is taken out of the creator’s hands, and given to conglomerates who want to gather and sell data to the highest bidder. Therefore, I believe that the Archive projects we examined in class are a better way of remembering the past. They are by nature “opt-in,” as people have to send in photos and memories themselves. The curators of these projects have a responsibility to be considerate in examining what posts to save, if space is a concern. As for long-term preservation of these materials, I do not have an answer. Relying on government bodies, like the Library of Congress, as the September 11 Digital Archive does, comes with concerns about the government’s goals (Home · September 11 Digital Archive). Although the loss of data is a huge concern, humanity has survived the burning of the Library of Alexandra. I am more concerned that we will not survive the complete loss of anonymity and personal control that the internet threatens.

 

Works Cited
Condie, Ally. Matched. Penguin, 2010.
Fleischer, Peter. “Foggy Thinking about the Right to Oblivion.” Peter Fleischer: Privacy…?, 9 Mar. 2011, http://peterfleischer.blogspot.com/2011/03/foggy-thinking-about-right-to-oblivion.html.
Home · September 11 Digital Archive. https://911digitalarchive.org/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2021.
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” American Historical Review, vol. 108, no. 3, June 2003, pp. 735–62.