Category Archives: Digital Humanities

Posted on by

To a Future Digital Humanist, from A Public Servant Erring Toward the Humanist Side

At the start of this course, I don’t think I really knew what I had signed up for. I was not familiar with the term “digital humanities” but it sounded like a course that would help me develop more technology skills and have some room for creativity – both things I enjoy! As we delved deeper into the course, it dawned on me that all this stuff we were doing was very intuitive to me. Had I done this before? I did not know what topic modeling was (and sure wished I knew about Zotero before) and I did know how deeply philosophical some of these categorization quandaries would get. Yet, the subject matter all spoke to me in a way that was very familiar. I remembered in my prior graduate degree in Public Administration using digital tools that I gently manipulated to create a concept project explaining how non-profit organizations function versus for-profit entities in a digital version of “Monopoly” to call attention to the differences. I also remember taking a course in grad school focused on “Digital Media For Change” that taught me ways to search for up and coming tech tools and how to evaluate their potential for solution-building in the world of activism and public policy deployment. But, throughout these learning experiences, I don’t ever remember the phrase “digital humanities.” Now that I have been introduced to the skill set of a digital humanist though, I finally realize that I had been engaged in the practice of digital humanities throughout much of my prior academic and professional work already; I just did not know it was a specific discipline in and of itself. I have been part of this tribe all along; I just have a vocabulary and set of category-creating questions to better understand what it is in comparison to other modalities of thinking and doing things. This is all to say, perhaps the most important thing I learned in this course was not a specific tool, but a way of thinking about and articulating solutions that may not be in everyone’s vocabulary.

This is a class where you should think of yourself as a pioneer making something new from the common tools we all have but might choose to apply differently. There will not be one right way to do things, and there will certainly be many things that go wrong (I think the pandemic counts here, and how it put a damper on our virtual reality class prospects), and that’s just how it should be. Do not compare yourself to others and what they produce, but collaborate and share ideas. Think less about what you don’t know (don’t let anxiety hijack your brain) and focus on what you want to do and then consider what tech tools might get you there and play with them. This is a place for curiosity, collaboration, and creativity. Embrace failure, because it might bring you to an unexpected success.

There are some tools from this class I’ll take. I’ll never cite without Zotero again – I needed that last semester alone! I can easily see how to incorporate StoryMaps into my work as a diplomat in sharing unique stories from around the world and Scalar, as much as a pain as it is to load content into at times, is a pretty slick story platform for the visually minded. But, more than anything, I’ll bring with me a confidence in advocating for why and how to use technology in my professional environment (which some have considered a less than quaint fossil – Secretary of State Colin Powell is most often credited with updating State Department technology infrastructure in the early 2000’s) because I’m so much more educated on digital humanities as an academic discipline now. That level of scholarship brings valuable credence when advocating to the U.S. government on why it is okay to tinker with tools still in development. I understand there is a cultural disconnect between being an official institution that needs to project its capabilities with certainty and the more “dynamic” processes of digital humanities. But, I also think that part of the U.S. government’s ability to show its strength comes in displaying appropriate amounts of authenticity at the very human level. Or, as the respected journalist Edward R. Murrow put it: “To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible, we must be truthful.” And, the truth is, we need to engage people where they are, which isn’t necessarily in person anymore; it is through technology platforms.

Murrow also famously said: “The real crucial link in the international exchange is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.” With all due respect to Murrow, sometimes, bridging the “last three feet” in person is desirable, but not necessarily feasible at the scale with which the State Department must operate now and in the future. But, with a little digital humanities savvy, we can still build a very human-centered community, no matter the technology interface that gets us there.

Posted on by

Week 14: VR and the Embodied Future

Virtual Reality, “…an immersive and interactive digital simulation that provides an experience of embodied presence in another world,” is not simply the purvey of VR-goggled video game enthusiasts. It comes in my gradations, from a tool like the stereoscope popular in the 19th century or even as far back in understanding as Plato’s influential Allegory of the Cave analysis. The conceptual popularity of virtual reality (VR) has only grown as technological capabilities have increased to develop the possibilities further. But, VR seems to divide many: is it cause for celebration in how it might help society, or is it a tool that will exacerbate existing social ills further?

Beyond those who find the VR-visual experience physically dizzying, there are good reasons to be concerned over other ill effects. Already, the debate over the harms of screen-time on children are serious enough that, ironically, many of the tech-makers of VR were the first to not allow their own children to partake in even TV watching up to a certain age. Scaled up, it is not inconceivable to imagine how easily the sensory gratification of more comprehensive VR experiences can make slaves of us all, from Brave New World to Black Mirror. While digital humanities projects such as Pure Land AR and Traveling While Black show educational uses with VR to expose others to import art and history, theater and VR scholar Robert Cable warns: “At what point does the consumption of not just imagery but full-scale experience become more about thrill than enlightenment, more about exoticism than education? This is the kind of question we need to bring to bear on a medium that offers a sense of “being there” that goes far beyond the capacities of photography or film.”

At the same time, Cable and others scholars show how VR has helped some individuals see things in a way that enhances their understanding, noting “Look, one of the functions of VR is to aid us in seeing the world around us with new eyes. And one of the great potencies of the arts is that they can take something we regard as simply part of the natural background of our lives, something that we don’t reflect upon or think about or maybe even notice, and show it to us in a new light.” Sarah Kenderine goes further, arguing that virtual reality constructs in myriad forms have contributed to an entire embodiment theory, which “…attempt to understand the mind as a set of physical processes derived from the brain and body of a human, that ultimately serve his or her action in the physical world.” Embodiment theory has wide ranging applications across disciplines all centering back to unraveling the human mind and how we enhance it on some level. The body is the learning path to the mind; to have intense sensory experiences, is to learn. While this may sounds like the realm of academic exploration, institutions as established as the Department of Defense have seen the efficacy in VR for recruiting and training soldiers. In some ways, it makes perfect sense – the VR video games many young men and women have already grown up playing, makes moving into the military sphere far more seamless than expected in terms of muscle memory and instincts. However, the question will still remain: does this make the Department of Defense cutting edge in its application of embodiment theory? Or does it paint them as manipulative in the manner that many institutions might create business for itself by supporting controversial habits to begin with?

Works Cited: 

Cable, Robert. “What Is Virtual Reality?” Text. Stanford Humanities, February 8, 2019. https://shc.stanford.edu/news/stories/what-virtual-reality.

Kenerdine, Sarah. “Embodiment, Entanglement, and Immersion in Cultural Heritage.” A New Companion to Digital Humanities, First Edition. Edited by Susan schreibman, Ray Siemans, and John Unsworth. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd:  2016.

Posted on by

Week 12/Week 13: Breaking Things or Making Things Anew?

Before this course, I don’t think I could have defined the field of digital humanities. And yet, the more I learn about what it means now, the more I realize I have been a practitioner of it far longer than I realized.

In our first class session, a question was posed that I thought was more of an ice-breaker than a formal marker of the start of the digital humanities journey. The professor asked what our favorite technology was. One of my favorite, unexpected answers was textile arts (I think she said weaving specifically, but I don’t remember fully now). It stood in contrast to more obvious (but no less valid) answers, and my classmate mentioned how weaving is the original technology that led to the earliest forms of modern computing. The more I think about her answer, the more clearly I see her point, but with a new twist. In weaving (or any type of textile art) one is finding a way to turn individual threads into a cohesive whole, and using the same colors or fabrics does not even guarantee a uniform product unless the fabric in question is being industrially produced by programmed machines. Skilled craftspeople who produce woven fabrics impart a unique aesthetic to each design they put together for a memorable item that can often carry a story and traditionally connects to a larger cultural story.

I think weaving or a similar craft-art is an apt metaphor for digital humanities. It fits somewhere between pure aesthetic and pure functionality. It has community-based origins, is strengthened through a community of practice, but can be performed solo. There are concerns and debates about appropriation, whether that be with turning sacred patterns into commercialized pieces that do not bring wealth back to the originating communities, or the debates over access (based on coding skills) as well as human biases that inevitably seep through into technology. As we discussed the importance of crowd-sourcing functions in digital humanities, it makes me think of the many threads woven together that might eventually reveal a pattern. A pattern itself invokes layers of classifications and categories – a design is the articulated sum of a category. While weaving is an ancient technology, the proper application of technology can scale it up for a level of functionality that clothes the world or even allows us to leave the planet. Thus, in many ways, digital humanities strikes me as a traditional craft simply grafted onto a new technological platform. It is about building something that will succumb to the digital death one day, but in the building of it, a last community can be born.

This focus on building something could appear to be the antithesis of “breaking things.” I don’t dispute that “breaking things” is a key component of how digital humanities functions. But, I think the way Mark Sample frames it when he writes “every fact is a fad and print is a prison. Instructors are insurgents and introductions are invasion,” it is a bit hyperbolic, which invites skepticism, which could discredit the importance of the digital humanities field as a whole. Perhaps he is banging the drum of revolution to get a general populace to pay attention to daily shifts that are truly exponential in comparison to the slower pace of technological innovation of a prior time and encompass more facets of our minds at once then we thought possible:

“Digital texts invite (or allow) us to do other things with our eyes, brains, and bodies while we experience them. As I write this, I have 9 windows open on my computer, each vying for my attention. Some of these windows have several frames in further competition. Advertisements. E-mail. Documents. Widgets. Social-networking tools. Chat interfaces. Each layer has an effect on how I engage the digital text. In spite of all these layers, I don’t think we experience a decreased attention; rather, the digital text demands a different sort of attention. Even as my direct engagement is challenged, my brain is offered more fuel for making connections and associative leaps.”

The above description from “Hybrid Pedagogy” is more tempered in delivery and more compelling in explaining the substance and effect of the digital humanities experience. But, rather than the obsession with breaking things, I would characterize digital humanities as the place where intersection is the norm. And, it is at the intersection of seemingly different things that true innovation happens. Why do immigrants generally have a track record of entrepreneurial success? Bringing from one culture something that is new to another culture but can fit in the space in between the two is one example of intersectionality. As a Californian, I celebrate the now ubiquitous sriracha sauce, which was created in California by a Vietnamese immigrant trying to recreate a fairly common type of seasoning back in Vietnam. It took off in a new way here and is now a quintessentially “American” condiment, even he gets some backlash for its lack of “authenticity.”

In playing with basic coding this week for the “Monkeys Writing Shakespeare” exercise, among other activities, I think one of the most important tools a successful digital humanist ultimately needs is the ability to be curious and have fun. When one really dwells on the volume of data in the world or the effort it takes to develop a prescribed skillset to near professional degrees (like coding to be able to fully build something from scratch) it is easy to get overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy, which creates stress and hampers the desire to try things. And, nothing gets done if we simply stop trying. Failure is inherent in life. How one deals with that failure determines where one goes next. Digital humanities is made more vital and more innovative the more inclusive it can be – bringing in different kinds of people (not just coders) increases the chances of intersections of innovation. And, if melodramatically referring to the practice as “breaking things” gives people the cover they need to try things, priming their minds for “failure” as being part of the process, then I can start to get onboard with the “breaking things” terminology Or, as “Hybrid Pedagogy” phrases it:

“It doesn’t matter to me if my classroom is a little rectangle in a building or a little rectangle above my keyboard. Doors are rectangles; rectangles are portals. We walk through.” This is where learning happens, at the breaking point of its various containers.”

Posted on by

Week 11: Scaling Up with Scalar

My first impression of using scalar as I was viewing projects created with it is it was a highly visual way of sharing content that could handle non-linear ways of “thinking”. I was particularly taken with how effectively scalar was deployed when reviewing a student research project entitled Sex Trafficking: Exploring Agency because of the searing visuals paired with key text and the implication of cyclicality using the scalar path set-up. I was equally impressed with the “non-linear” personal exploration and creativity deployed in “Daddy Labyrinth” not just for the content itself, but the seamless way it employed interactive images the user could manipulate to embody the writer’s point of view. Scalar sounded exciting because of its flexibility of organization to create a slick looking story with a dynamic foundation.

But, I suppose the flip-side of creating a “non-linear” way of operating means that the intuitiveness of the program requires a lot of tinkering to realize the full range of tools and visualizations! I think with time and free-play I’ll get there; if anything, I have found having space to play and experiment is the best antidote to combating any intimidation with a new tool. But, I have been slow in figuring out how my visuals will actually show-up as I become familiar with the terminology scalar uses. Or, perhaps it is terminology well-utilized on various media publishing tools and I’m still learning the jargon as a budding digital humanist pushing through technical areas.

For my practicum project, I decided to stick with content that I was very familiar with so that I could focus more on navigating scalar without overthinking what the effort would amount to. So, I mixed published content and personal memoirs all centered around the fascinating life-story of my grandmother, Jessie Lichauco, to draw attention to a documentary film I assisted with a few years ago. However, even with total confidence on the content I would be using, jumping into scalar was slowed by the fact that no matter the technology, one has to take a few minutes to think through organization regardless of the medium employed to share that information. What were the key bits of information that I wanted to share that could be organized into a cohesive but succinct narrative? After that process, I had to then translate how that might fit with the tools scalar had available. And, from there, there is no substitute for the arduous task of data input – uploading or linking to media that would be included in the process.

Toward the end of the feature-length film “Curiosity, Adventure, and Love” (which runs about 60 minutes), my grandmother ponders how we can have more forms of communication and yet fail to further relate to one another. I pondered that thought too as I worked my way through scalar, one of many digital tools I have now learned to interact with in my lifetime.

Posted on by

Week 10 Practicum: Digital Solutions Still Require Real-Life Connections

The Center for American War Letters at Chapman University is an archive that draws in a specific segment of users already but is likely to interest a wider group with some digital humanities strategies in mind. A key principal to remember throughout these suggestions for a digital humanities approach is that: “Social media should not focus on the technology, but the activity that is undertaken.”

Scale Up Digitization Process With Help From Chapman Students and Community Partners: 

While CAWL has been forward-leaning in digitizing its collections to the degree possible, the more its collection can be digitized, the more its offerings can be made available to a wider audience than traditional CAWL consumers (likely academics/students, historians, veterans, etc.). However, staffing to meet those needs can become costly and those valuable materials cannot be entrusted to just anyone to physically work with. Chapman students, specifically history undergrads and war and society grad students, should be required to perform a set period of digitization service for CAWL as part of their program graduation requirements. As they are studying programs that make use of primary resources and are already at campus, they would benefit from learning about archival preservation and accessibility issues while providing a service to their institution. If each was asked to be responsible for digitizing one collection of letters under CAWL staff direction at a mutually agreeable time in their campus schedule, a wide degree of material could be made made available publicly. It could be worth considering whether students in other majors that have a reasonable link to this sort of effort (history, English and creative writing, computer science majors, for example) could also be considered.

Chapman could also consider a mutually beneficial public engagement partnership to have members of interested communities (local historical societies and veteran chapters) help with this process as well. This may crowdsource real labor to seemingly responsible individuals and the return might be Chapman/CAWL educating local historical societies or providing a masterclass/speaker one time a year to those groups as an incentive to participate. Given the number of military and veterans groups in Southern California alone this could be an interesting way to build bridges with the local community and draw attention to CAWL’s unique offerings.

In order to have appropriate supervision for this endeavor, it might be necessary to factor in the cost of an additional archivist at CAWL, depending on current staffing patterns.

Creatively Connect: Institutions and Individuals, Artists and Media

Without knowing the fuller context of Chapman’s affiliations already, finding ways to connect Chapman to the Department of Defense’s Office of the Historian, or to build further partnerships with military-focused museums (of which there are several locally, many of them “ship” museums) could generate renewed interest in CAWL’s collection. But, as those types of lofty-partnerships take time and dedicated personnel to build relationships, perhaps a more niche, digital solution is to find who is already “following” those types of endeavors in their social media form and then creating digital advertising campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and other popular social media targeting those same fans steering them to CAWL’s offerings. At the same time, an additional box on the CAWL website could further funnel users to a digital humanities “Engage with CAWL” toolkit where the digital user could see how to apply a built-in text analysis tool or topic modeling tool to “distantly read” a digitized letter collection so they could be “puzzled” into how we consume the past. This would complement the existing virtual museum online.

It is one thing that show what CAWL has, but if the user is also encouraged, invited, or incentivized in some way to engage the material on his/her terms of interest more freely, that could generate new artistic and media products in unexpected ways. Chapman could consider creating a small, annual prize for members of the public who utilize the letters in the collection for a creative or innovative project that provides clear benefit to Chapman, veterans, or the general public in some way. That prize needn’t necessary be financial (maybe a zoom coffee with a Chapman faculty member, a really nice article published to Chapman’s site about the winner, maybe a printed out set of the digitized letter collection for the winner to keep as a physical book), but the psychology of being recognized by an established academic institution could be a resume builder for many. High quality products (whether that be a video, a paper, a graphic novel/comic strip reinterpretation of a letter, other project, etc.) would be prominently shared on the CAWL website.

Work Cited:

Ross, Claire. “Social Media for Digital Humanities and Development” In Digital Humanities in Practice Claire Warwick et al., p. 24-25 Facet Publishing, 2012.

Posted on by

Week 9 Practicum: The Bipolar Experience of Modern Archival Work

American film mogul Orson Welles famously said, “There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” One might also posit the world of record keeping carries a similar burden of being pegged to extremes, perhaps somewhere between “forgettable” and “vital” to the layman.

Record-keeping in the digital age is full of some of the most intellectually complex challenges out there, as Chapman’s own archivist, Andy Harman, or the widely known Roy Rowsenzweig can tell you. ““Digital documents—precisely because they are in a new medium—have disrupted long-evolved systems of trust and authenticity, ownership, and preservation. Reestablishing those systems or inventing new ones is more difficult than coming up with a long-lived storage mechanism.”

But, this is a challenge the general public may never stop to consider until it impacts one’s life on a personal level. Perhaps the digital service one subscribes to for storing one’s most treasured photos fails or becomes prohibitively expensive and a decade of photos disappear without any other physical record. Or, as the time-capsule looking but still relevant documentary, Into the Future discusses how not maintaining records for old hazardous waste sites might lead to a contaminated housing development later such as the Love Canal incident. Would a homeowner suffering in a tragedy such that consider bad record-keeping the bad guy?

 

Rowsenzweig also gave this example on how the Federal government itself asserts the importance of record keeping but delivers an uneven performance in that obligation: “Although most government agencies started using e-mail and word processing in the mid-1980s, the National Archives still does not require that digital records be retained in that form, and governmental employees profess confusion over whether they should be preserving electronic files.” It made me remember a required, annual training State Department employees like myself must complete on understanding the record keeping process. It is probably one of the more difficult trainings despite its seemingly banal nature. The key area I had to constantly review when I got training questions wrong was essentially to better untangle what was considered a record that must be kept and follow and appropriate disposition schedule, and what was not. When some of the materials and terms actually include things like “non-records” and hybrid products (basically, when you have sent something using one’s work email but it contains both a mix of personal and work/record-worthy material), it becomes jarringly clear a three hour, asynchronous, online course on record-keeping is really just showing that this is a far more complex topic than it often gets credit for. Or, as Rowsenzweig sums up later: “Preservation of the past is, in the end, often a matter of allocating adequate resources. Perhaps the largest problem facing the preservation of electronic government records has nothing to do with technology; it is, as various reports have noted, “the low priority traditionally given to federal records management.””

There is a tenuous balance in decision making to be made with finite financial, human, and technological resources between how much of the past should be preserved in consideration of moving forward with other inquiries. The adage “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” echoes throughout this question. But, ever relevant too is the adage “out with the old, in with the new.” Does exerting too many resources to focus on preserving the past just make for a more academic version of hoarding? As the rate at which we can produce content digitally outpaces what we have time, ability, and desire to preserve, the importance of thoughtful decision stands out as the key tool to rescue us from drowning in data. There are no simple answers, but some thoughts that enter my mind in this discussion:

1. How does culture play a role in what we consider worth keeping?

While living in China, I was always upset at seeing how readily the government seemed to bulldoze historical parts of the city I lived in only to recreate what I would call a Disney-fied version of the same thing. Where I saw reckless version of “restoration” many of my Chinese friends and colleagues simply saw progress – show the best version of the concept there. However, this was complicated further in that some of the areas destroyed were specifically Uighur (non-Han Chinese/ethnic minority Muslim community) neighborhoods. In the context of what the Chinese central government is perpetrating in the Uighur cultural home of Xinjiang state now, it makes me wonder if it is closer to the example of how libraries, museums, and other cultural repositories in Bosnia were deliberately targeted as part of war per an example from Into the Future. This idea is further explored in the excellent war and society history called The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War.

2. Who decides what is kept and what goes into that decision making process? Is preservation of the past a public good or just a digital-age commodity?

Rowsenzweig  also frames the discussion of preserving the past as a discussion on what the value of the past is and to whom. “That scholarly engagement should also lead us, I believe, to public action to advocate the preservation of the past as a public responsibility—one that historians share.” But, in the example about NARA and the Federal government above show poor leadership by public institutions in preserving the past, is that an argument for private institutions or industry to take the lead? They certainly have more technological prowess and the ability to adapt quickly. But, Rowsenzweig chillingly points out something I had only begun to realize in the last few years about who impacts archival processes and what that says about the perception of authorship of knowledge. “It has put the future of the past—traditionally seen as a public patrimony—in private hands.” While I lack hope in Federal level effectiveness in preserving the past in terms of how quickly in can respond to what is needed, I tend to agree with Rowsenzweig that allowing private hands to control the collective past does not inspire confidence either.

3. Apart from the learning that informs our sense of progress, why do we generally keep things? Why are some people more content living life with fewer possessions while others cannot stop collecting things (physically or in other ways)?

I think the desire to find archival solutions speaks to our sense of mortality. We are constantly striving to find things that will outlive us. Not being reassured that our story will be shared after we pass away, or trying to make sure a piece of our history lives on, whether that be in what we bequeath physically, financially, or even digitally now, creates an anxiety that threatens our sense of memory, arguably more important than our physical life. I cannot seem to locate the source now, but I recall in some cultures of West Africa one is only considered to have passed away when the last person who knew that individual personally is no longer around. Digital record-keeping has the potential to maintain a legacy of individual history, if we can find a way to locate, appreciate, and manage each tree in a growing digital jungle.

Works Cited:

Dailymotion. “Into the Future: On the Preservation of Knowledge (Clip 1) – Video Dailymotion.” Accessed April 1, 2021. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa9dp6.
“Scarcity or Abundance?” Accessed April 1, 2021. https://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/scarcity.php.
Posted on by

Week 4 Practicum: The Neural Net as a Mirror of Thought

The name “neural net” sounds like the other side of the coin where one might also find written “world wide web.” The focus is on connecting through numerous strands (ideas, people, commerce, etc.) but the nodes at which we meet are not always where we would expect. Using a neural net reminded me so much of my days as an improvisational theater performer in high school and college and the types of exercises and games that help with creative associations to build a narrative on the fly. We practice a craft and overtime, we get better at it and can even deliver fairly consistent quality even if each performance is totally unique and no one knows where it will lead to. It can still be a worthwhile and thought-provoking performance (apart from the pure entertainment value) when the performers are skilled enough and well-informed on cultural and current events happening.

In playing with the use of the “Talk to Transformer” neural net tool, I entered humanities type questions in complement to the literary texts I had used in topic modeling experiments, T.S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” being top of mind. I started first by entering the question “What was T.S. Eliot trying to say about modern life in his poetry?” Surprisingly, the text that answered back said that we could learn about T.S. Eliot by contrasting his work with another poet. The text then goes on to talk explicitly about the other poet, leaving the question I posed and the answer returned feeling as empty as J. Alfred Prufrock was bereft of emotional courage in that titular poem. On the other hand, filling in with the knowledge I have of T.S. Eliot’s work, I could say there is something almost meta about the neural net’s answer given how much of Eliot’s work focused on isolation and uncertainty. The answer I got isolated Eliot’s work entirely out of sight and made me uncertain of what I could get out of this experiment.

Neural Net Response on T.S. Eliot

Neural Net: Questions and answers on T.S. Eliot’s poetry.

 

I had more success with a shorter, more open-ended type question or statement on what poetry is and its purpose to us humans. I repeated the search a couple of times, and got fairly different responses back, with one focusing on poetry’s “potential” but stating one needn’t actually understand the words themselves but should instead focus on the subject matter and structure. A similar but not identical query on poetry then brought up a more practical and applied reason for it all, saying poetry was important for telling us how to live our lives as empathetic individuals in contrast to religion. This was then followed by what looks more like an op-ed clip about the suffering happening in Syria now with blame pinned on Western foreign policy.

Neural Net on Poetry's Purpose

Neural Net on Poetry’s Purpose

Neural Net on What Poetry Does For Us

Neural Net on What Poetry Does For Us

 

I think the wildly different responses I received on this experiment with the neural net reflects a spontaneity and stream of consciousness style of human thinking and communication that is common in the average person and seems to have been successfully replicated and amplified in the neural net process. After all, the neural net is being programmed by humans and our idiosyncrasies as a species just becomes more visible when a different “species” can mirror back. I’d almost say what I found most useful about the neural net, then, is not what concrete answers it could give me to my discrete questions entered, but the tone and style of what it relayed back held a mirror up to a wider range of how a human brain works versus how a computer can.

Posted on by

Week 4 Practicum: The Modern Art of Topic Modeling

Prior to this week’s practicum, I was unfamiliar with topic modeling “…a method of computational linguistics that attempts to find words that frequently appear together within a text and then group them into clusters.” But, in the context of understanding algorithm basics I knew that whatever I would be working with would generate more questions than answers. After all, as dana boyd made clear in a past presentation on “Data, Algorithms, Fairness, Accountability,”  “there is nothing about doing data analysis that is neutral.” One thing that already seemed at odds about the process of using a topic modeling tool was using literature as the data input for a tool that some scholars suggest is better suited to analyzing materials that is copious in volume but somewhat limited in its topical scope as illuminated by an example of a midwife’s daily diary from the late 1700’s to early 1800’s. “In many ways, it seems that Martha Ballard’s diary is ideally suited for this kind of analysis. Short, content-driven entries that usually touch upon a limited number of topics appear to produce remarkably cohesive and accurate topics.”

By contrast, in finding texts that I knew well and were readily available for this project I focused on literary works from the world of theater and poetry: Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. In order to harness the full capability of a topic modeling tool, considering the best way to match tool to the job at hand is key. I suspect topic modeling provides limited efficacy in analyzing the items I chose. Now, if I had had the time to enter the full canon of Shakespeare’s plays or T.S. Eliot’s work across his career, the power of the topic modeling tool might have been more awe-inspiring. On the other hand, given the earlier suggestions by scholars that a text with limited topics to begin with could yield more fruitful topic modeling results, I think the comprehensive range of issues a Shakespeare play touches upon alone would render the tool impotent. Or, perhaps this is simply my conceit as a human being feeling threatened by the potential power of a digital algorithm.

But, in the process of entering my literary texts into the topic modeling tool a few things stood out.

First, I really needed to format my text to prepare it to be entered into the tool, otherwise, information that was not part of the text of interest would be mistakenly included in the topic modeling word list. For example, since all the text on Project Gutenberg from which I drew Shakespeare’s and Eliot’s work came with legally-mandated language preceding the text of interest, I had to put everything into a TextEdit window so I could erase the Project Gutenberg boilerplate language lest that be incorporated into the text.

Topic Model Example - The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

A Topic Model of “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

 

Secondly, by using poetry or works filled with highly poetic dialogue by one author famous for coining words and phrases that didn’t exist in the English language prior (Shakespeare) as well as work by a modernist poet whose work actually is characterized by a certain level of artistically inflected, deliberately unfinished phrases, it makes the topic modeling output a bit trickier for analysis because sometimes I cannot tell what is computer linguistic nonsense and what was part of the artistic license of the author. After all, it is generally those with mastery of their native tongue who demonstrate that mastery precisely in breaking grammatical rules. With a computer algorithm fully focused on finding rules for the rule-less moments, it starts to look kind of confusing in a topic modeling chart.

Topic Model of Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare

A Topic Model of “Titus Andronicus” by William Shakespeare.

 

Finally (and following on the second concern above), depending on a more subjective view of what merits artistic accolades or not, what is worthy of being called literary art can be subjective. Ever go to a modern art museum with a friend, you both look at a work of art that you aren’t sure is really art, and then one of you blurts out “my two year old could have made that,” and then you are both staring ahead wondering who would overpay for such art and why did you pay for tickets to this exhibition anyway? I think something like that comes into play in my mind as I read through the words coming together in a new way that leaves wondering did the algorithm really reveal something brilliant my human mind could not capture, or did the algorithm just spit out a bunch of words randomly, and because of how my brain provides the contextual mortar that can hold those literary bricks together (from having read those pieces many times before as a full work) did I invent a building out of the computer’s haphazard throwing of bricks? How much credit should the algorithm get for doing anything? Can you tell I’m a bit skeptical on this tool still?

For now, as I read the topic lists I’ve generated from this project, I think I’ll not over-analyze them but enjoy them as a remix to the original text, a tribute to literary classics with a digital melody line that makes it feel a bit newer.

Works Cited:

(1) boyd, danah. 2016. “Data, Algorithms, Fairness, Accountability” U.S Department of Commerce, Data Advisory Council. Washington, DC, October 28.

(2) Topic Modeling: A Basic Introduction Journal of Digital Humanities.” Accessed February 24, 2021. http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/topic-modeling-a-basic-introduction-by-megan-r-brett/.

(3) “Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary | Cameron Blevins,” November 16, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20161116080309/http://www.cameronblevins.org/posts/topic-modeling-martha-ballards-diary/.

Posted on by

Week 3 Practicum: Text Analysis of The Great Gatsby

In analyzing text as a humanities scholar, diving deep into a key phrase or passage is often the best way to develop a hypothesis or summarize the literary significance of a work. Think of phrases that have become short-hand micro-summaries or prompts for a literary work’s key theme. To see the words “To be or not to be,” most scholars immediately think of Hamlet and the start of that soliliquy that questions existential choices. When one reads “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” the extremes of human experience made concrete in Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” could not be more plain yet poetic.

By contrast, in using a digital tool for text analysis, the humanities analysis process could not be more opposite and the results more different. This act of “distant reading” can reveal patterns our human minds are not adept at spotting through such a large volume of words, but in the process I find myself feeling like a layer of humanity that makes literature worth examining is lost. I see benefit in how digital tools can investigate how a text was structurally created or in revealing the change of an author’s writing work over time. But, will the data digital tools spit out truly capture what makes literature speak to the truth of the human condition? I suspect not.

As one way of testing this out, I use a word cloud created on WordClouds.com to run a text analysis of the American literature classic The Great Gatsby.

Great Gatsby Word Cloud

As beautiful as the word cloud that came out was, I found it to be devoid of meaning and even misleading because much of what makes the book so interesting is what is implied between the lines of the relationships than what is directly said by the web of key characters. Additionally, as much fun as playing with the different customizing features of this word cloud tool was, I realized that in seemingly frivolous aesthetic choices to adjust colors, fonts, shapes, etc. some words literally became easier to read than others, which could skew the conclusions a reader may make in this “analysis.” For example, even though reviewing the accompanying text excel sheet paired with the visual word cloud tabulated the most commonly used words, the second most prominent word, “Gatsby” (used 189 times throughout the book) is not easily visible in the word cloud, whereas the next most frequent word (“Tom” at 175 times used) was front and center in the word cloud. How could that be based on the tools own quantitative data? To make amends to the key character, Gatsby, I made the word cloud itself into the shape of the letter “G,” a visual reminder of the ubiquity of Gatsby’s presence throughout the story even when he was not directly in a scene. Like Mark Twain’s famous quote about there being “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” qualitative data is no less subject to manipulation. As digital tools make more compelling info-graphics for communicating data, I worry that the attractive visual aids may delude us into thinking we have facts in front of us. The evidence we need to draw accurate conclusions will not always be pretty.

Posted on by

Week 2: Reflection on Classifications for Digital Humanities

Three years ago, I reported for duty as the new Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy Juba (South Sudan). Working as a political reporting officer has some overlap with the skills of a good journalist in that it requires a lot of meeting people and understanding everything happening locally, and with all that comes a lot of taking notes to keep track of developments to be reported on. As diplomats like myself rotate in and out of different locations around the world, it is valuable to have a smooth transition between officers. Sometimes we do that by overlapping with our predecessor in the job for a few days to a week if we are lucky so they can help introduce us to their valuable contacts for local information. But, more realistically, we try to prepare “hand off” notes to give to the incoming officer.

After 36 hours of non-stop travel from the United States, I landed next to the Nile River in Juba, dropped my bags off at the shipping container I would call home for the year, and headed to my shared office at the Embassy before the work day ended to see what my predecessor had left for me there. On my desk was a range of precariously stacked towers of spiral-bound notebooks. It was like multiple rounds of “Jenga” had been played out on my desk. As I saw it, an office mate grinned at the mountains of chaotic notebooks and said, “Oh, yeah, your predecessor left you all his notes to help you get started.” I tried to hold back my irritation as I prepared to deal with the mess on my desk. I then noticed a bright post-it note on top of it all that said “just kidding.” My colleagues then reassured me it was just a “welcome” prank by my predecessor. They then gave me an organized binder with summaries of key political reporting priorities the team had been working on, contacts to seek out, and other useful information – the real “hand off” notes.

My emotional reaction had been of disbelief and anger that an able professional would leave such a thoughtless mess of notes (which turned out to not be the case). But, I remember that moment now as we discussed the importance of classification in our Digital Humanities practicum this week. If those notebooks had indeed been my predecessor’s idea of information organization and sharing, it would have taken me more time to figure out his system of note-taking and categorizing what was still useful and relevant and what was not than if I just threw it all in a shredder and figured out things on my own. In that scenario, one aspect of the power of classification was revealed: information itself is not valuable unless it is managed effectively.

But, the bigger lesson is classification isn’t a mechanism just to organize. The act of classifying generates meaning through the use of categories that both reflect inherent qualities in the data while also capturing what is valuable to who might be using that data and why. Or, as more fully spelled out from C. M. Sperberg-McQueen in our readings this week:

“Classification serves two purposes, each important: by grouping together objects which share properties, it brings like objects together into a class; by separating objects with unlike properties into separate classes, it distinguishes between things which are different in ways relevant to the purpose of the classification. The classification scheme itself, by identifying properties relevant for such judgments of similarity and dissimilarity, can make explicit a particular view concerning the nature of the objects being classified.”

On a simpler level, classification is the process of making both active and passive choices. What is included? What is left out? What do we draw attention to? What is taken for granted as “common knowledge” (which is itself loaded with assumptions)? In everyday life, we make classification choices (sometimes unconsciously from what language we choose to use, unconscious judgement about someone we choose not to interact with in our daily lives, etc.) but in Digital Humanities, such as in the creation of databases to categorize information we are collecting and analyzing, thoughtful design is required in order to make the data we classify consistent, coherent, retrievable, and valuable to the users. Living in the information age has shown us that an abundance of information through the internet does not necessarily mean we use all of that information or make better choices with more information. In fact, it is easy to be overwhelmed with choice. Thus, careful efforts at employing classification processes allows us to “farm” information so it can be harvested and nourish us toward better “health” (more productive outcomes). To simply bombard a user with raw data might be akin to getting lost in an overgrown tangle of forest.

But, classification is not an inherently easy task either, even if its importance can be easily understood. And, even when data has been thoughtfully classified, users of that data can take the same information and end up in very different places. Give a chef the same “farmed” information you would a basic home cook, and dinner might come out very differently in each of those kitchens.

By the end of my one year assignment in South Sudan, I had learned a lot, written a lot, and met many important figures in the political scene. But, in some ways, I felt one of my most important achievements was in taking time to organize everything I learned and putting together a more extensive set of organized “hand-off” notes to my successor, who I also arranged to arrive while I was still there so I could get him started with more than I had to work with. But, at the end of the day, those notes and briefings were still driven by classifications I had mentally made in the course of my work experience there. What was worth knowing and doing, and what was not worth mentioning? Part of this is driven by knowing the audience we both reported to in Washington, DC, but part of it was driven by my perceptions of the world and value judgements I make. I wonder now, three years later, what information I contributed is still accessible and relevant to the current political officer at post, and what has vanished into the ether of our information atmosphere.

Works Cited:

“A Companion to Digital Humanities.” Accessed February 11, 2021. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-3-2&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-3-2&brand=default.