Caroline Kelly

In the medieval era the ability to read and write were the markers of education, these days I am reminded of this mentality when I think of how we approach coding. Speaking latin has been replaced with writing code and the literacy divide has now become the digital divide. In preparation for my final project, I attended several workshops as an introductory to building a Virtual or Augmented Reality tool. 

There are of course multiple programs that offer free workshops in the attempt to have you use their product or purchase additional training. These workshops provide a foundation that even a layman such as myself found useful. The availability on both Coursera and Udemy offered the widest range of topics covered, and provide plenty of options. However, the design and setup of Circuit Stream most resembled a traditional classroom and offered a lot of support. In terms of its accessibility.

The course provides an introduction to Unity, one of the leading programs for developing AR, VR and 3d gaming apps. Unity is used in both commercial and academic functions, and between the Unreal Engine, is a dominant platform for 3D development. The workshop provided a basic understanding of how to create an app-based AR experience that creates monsters similar to Pokemon Go. Attendees are required to download in advance the Unity software, the Tool Kit and to enable key features such as Visual Studio for effects.  During the workshop, the instructor goes through adding project files to Unity which are the Pokemon “monsters”. This being an augmented space much attention must be paid to the external area, that is the reality portion. Unlike traditional coding, there is an element of the unknown as the developer has to account for the changing space that the camera is projecting onto. When developing software it is an essential function to account for the geometric planes that will impact whether the “monster” is on the floor vs the table vs the ceiling. 

Of interest was a comment made by another presenter. Some Digital Humanities scholars working in Unity are concerned as questions of obsolescence and external control of the platform are ever-present. While the AR program does allow for code to be written that can easily be translated to run on IOS, Android, PC and Mac devices, the potential loss of control for content creators remains. To a Digital Humanities scholar losing their life’s work because software is no longer supported would be devastating. There was also some discussion in regards to censorship in the virtual world. Already we are seeing early forms of censorship such as the fact that the Coke logo could not be used in an AR platform and would be censored as Coke had a contract with the AR tool who agreed to ban other users from allowing their AR media to interact with coke products. This stands in contrast to the use of a logo for parody or satire which would not be banned were it in a Youtube video and not a virtual space. As we are discussing Augmented Reality we had to also consider that some areas where for sensitivity, political, or other reasons, augmented reality might be inappropriate to use and how this should be addressed. It makes you question Who determines what can be in AR or not? Who determines what locations can be part of AR?

By the end of the 1.5 hour workshop I was not able to transfer the project to an application but was able to obtain a conceptual framework that I can build on. It was far from a Pokemon Go experience, but it did provide some key foundational understanding of what even building an AR experience would look like.

Caroline Kelly Blog Post

All too often we hear appeals to data as a counter to any argument that touches upon systemic inequality or involves emotion. In the eyes of many, data has become the “new truth”, it is supposed to be divorced from emotion and be objective. Data has become the manifestation of facts. The selection by Catherin D’Igazio and Laura Klein on “Why Data Science Needs Feminism” explores the biases and entrenched systems that undermine this argument. Data purports to have a pureness, it is simply the collection of quantifiable data points but its current and historical use belies this assertion.

It is often said that what is measured is managed. One of the key arguments made in this selection is the inherent biases that can impact this information. Everything from collection methods to presentation and even intended audience can impact its seemingly unbiased representation. Data can be heavily flawed at two critical points, at the preceding point where the intended use is being conceived, and at the collection point where key factors can be ignored. A misstep at any of these points can radically alter the meaning of data.

Data is all too often presented in an ipso facto manner, and the argument is made that it really can not be. The cited story of Christine Darden, a women data scientist in the early days of NASA is telling of this very clear flaw. When she deigned to ask why there were no women at the upper echelons of leadership the response was a simple: “because we thought they were content where they were”. Any data that would attempt to measure gender representation at such a company would ignore the underlying decisions that impacted it. This simple example demonstrates how data alone cannot be the answer to any question without being placed in context. While this is a particularly telling story, how many companies and organizations never have a Christine Darden to question why and incite change?

The concept of intersectionality is a fascinating one, all the more so because it is a concept that would be difficult to represent with data. Intersectionality thrives in the grey space, the influence of various aspects of a person’s social, racial, and sexual identity are incredibly difficult to quantify. How much categorization would be required? One of the interesting aspects that is suggested is how some minority traits could serve as an advantage when presented against an “otherness” that is more apparent. How would someone classify such a person? Intersectionality is a very real concept, one that suggests an individualism that contradicts raw data collection. And the fact is intersectionality as a concept is not some rare thing but readily present in all people.

The guidelines presented as representative of Data Feminism are a great framework to analyze all data. While the use of the term Data Feminism does play heavily on the binary they purport to question, overall the principles therein are a great guide for anyone using data.

Origin of the Assignment

With my natural gravitation towards studying what is not traditionally studied, I delved into the world of adolescent mementos in the form of Autograph Albums and Yearbooks. 

I came across an old Autograph Book filled with quotes and messages to a “real swell girl” living in 1940’s upstate New York. Autograph Books date back to the 16th century and eventually became outdated by the 1970s with yearbooks. I was really taken by the difference in language between early 19th century teenagers and my own youth and even the present day. Far different from “H.A.G.S.” (have a good summer) messages the albums included life advice, hopes for the future, quotes, poems, and other messages from classmates. 

Autograph album of Betty Jean Clarke of Clinton, New  York

“Best wishes to you for  alife of happiness, success and the realization of your ambitions”

“Yours till the sand of the desert grow cold, And the leaves of the judgement book unfold. 

P.S. Lots of Luck and Happiness”

But I was also taken by such clout mixed with sentimentality at the critical age when seniors are simultaneously closing the chapter of their childhood and beginning their early adulthood. It is both a time of mourning, nostalgia and one of hope. A moment shining with opportunity and devoid of regret. 

Why Yearbooks?

I set out to cast a net through teenage ephemera to observe the changes in the past century in the  way youth communicate about their beliefs and values in the past and the future. I also selected a list of years that have been reported by historians as being difficult including: 1918, 1929, 1941, 1962, 1968, 2001, and 2020. 

I approached the project as both an exploration, but also as an experiment seeking to test my hypothesis. My methodology was aimed at reducing as many confounding variables as possible and providing as much data to abstract statistical relevance.

I opted for yearbooks instead of the richer text of autograph albums for the following reasons:

1. Controlled sample
   1. Yearbooks follow the same format and have not changed. They are relatively the same across state lines, districts, time and advances in technology (we still follow the same format in 2020 as 1920. 
   2. Age of “authors” are consistent – they are all teenagers
   3. Confounding variables such as location, socio-economic class, and gender could be better controlled due to the large sample available. For this project yearbooks from the same co-ed school were used.

2. Accessibility
   1. Yearbooks have been scanned by ancestry.com or classmate.com websites
   2. Available in .txt formats
   3. Common item know by most people

3. Of note
   1. Yearbooks have a narrative structure with a clear publishing date 
   2. Public documents, not personal items
   3. A commercialized industry with set standards and formats
   4. Not typically studied 

Tools

• InternetArchive.org website
• Voyant 
• LIWC – Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count
• SPSS

Sample

• Malden High School located in Malden, Massachusets was selected as the sample as there was a consistent record of yearbooks dating back to 1919. Other schools were eliminated as they did not have co-ed classes in earlier years. Years in the 1920s had 2 books per year titled A and B.

Methods

• 105 yearbooks dating from 1919 – 2015 were downloaded as txt files. 
• Voyant platform was used to analyze the documents
• A list of stop words was created to exclude common words “Street”, proper names “John”, and clean out text from computer scanning like “pxl”. 
• The most prominent 300 Corpus Terms were downloaded and categorized in the LIWC dictionary 
• The full text of all 105 yearbooks were also processed through the LIWC platform
• In SPSS Yearbooks from the years 1919, 1929, 1941, 1968, and 2001 were marked as critical years and Yearbooks published in 1920, 1930, 1941, 1969, and 2002 were also coded after and Yearbooks published in 1918, 1929, 1941, 1967, and 2000 were coded as year before critical year. 
• Preliminary SPSS tests were used to compare LIWC scores between critical years and years immediately proceeding and following.

Preliminary Results

Cirrus Word Cloud of top terms across yearbooks

“Future” and “Past” terms throughout Years. Overall the term “Future” is used more than the “Past” for most years.

Overall yearbook text has more language associated with the past than the future. 

Across all yearbooks, LIWC analysis found that positively associated text was more common than negative associated text. 

Of the negative emotions, sadness was more prominent than words associated with anxiety or anger.

A comparison of texts in critical years did not show a statistically significance difference in future or past-oriented text when compared to non-critical years. However, a comparison of all LIWC variables found a significant difference between words associated with feelings and death between critical and non-critical years. 

Conclusion 

Additional analysis utilized grouping terms would provide additional insight in the relationship between cognitive states as categorized in LIWC between yearbook years. Further development of a measure of “critical years” is also needed. 

Other steps for this dataset would include combining the files for years in the 1920’s that were split in A and B yearbooks. Also, expanding the pool to other schools would allow for a more diverse dataset and allow for comparison between schools. Similarly comparing the popularity of words using Ngram may provide an additional frame of reference.

Caroline Kelly

In this era where reading is so ubiquitous, we forget that literacy was at one point the sole provenance of an established elite. Despite the democratization of literacy how, and why we read is as crucial as what we read. As The Untold Story of the Talking Book demonstrates the division of reading has become one of the primary methods by which we classify the educated from the uneducated.                                      

Tracing the historical roots of the spoken word, or audio book, Matthew Rubery succinctly demonstrates the artificial divide that arose when the printed word became more readily available. Whereas spoken word pieces were once the norm and accessible to all within hearing distance, the printed word allowed the construction of artificial barriers and gatekeepers. The rise of both the industrial and information ages required the opening of the gates and of particular note is this dismissal of the audio book as being somehow less.

This is inherently a bias of neurotypical individuals as Rubery points out. As the book of John so aptly put it, “in the beginning was the word”. Spoken language was the first abstraction, and so of course eventually manifested in the spoken word narrative. It is such a critical part of our comprehension that it even manifests itself in how we perceive the world. The phenomena of onomatope is fascinating, but the truth is that language goes beyond even this literal abstraction. We say a world like bitter and just in saying the words our mouths mechanically need to almost pucker to say it. Did the etymology evolve as a consequence of this movement or was it created, that is this movement created by this definition? There would seem to be an inherent relationship between sound and language that shape and define one another. Such is our natural bias towards the spoken word that Rubery says that deaf children have a far more difficult time learning how to read than do the blind.

Even “silent reading” incorporates an element of the audio as many people read by hearing the disembodied narrator’s voice in their heads. We are all in essence listening to an audio book if we have an inner monologue. The difference between the reader providing the voice versus that of an artificial narrator in an audio book may lie less in the audio book format and more in the subtle nuances of meaning and who provides it. Whether the audio book changes the authorial intent is irrespective, as the reader will always alter the writers meaning to fit their own interpretation. It is no more difficult for a listener to alter an audio books meaning than it is for a reader to alter the writers meaning if this is our intent. Arguments that suggest audio books are somehow more prone to this than the written fail to account as to how even video footage can be altered in meaning and even in literal content by a viewer’s memory. This bias may arise from the fact that audio seems so much more ephemeral because it has no physical presence but it is in fact no less verifiable than a written note.

Rubery goes on the cite how neurological evidence even seems to confirm the lack of distinction between audio books listening versus reading the printed word. To dismiss the audio book then as lesser is to demonstrate a desire to delineate valid from invalid. There is little basis to do so beyond a need to divide. As we begin to understand reading as a process of abstraction and informational transmission and less as the literal act of silent phonetic recitation we approach the realm of Digital Humanities. This middle ground retains an appreciation for both the end goal and the process by which that goal is met. 

Praxis I Assignment – Caroline Kelly

Interpretation of the Assignment

With the limitless potential of “Create a map of something that is not necessarily -or traditionally thought of as – mappable” my approach to this assignment was most driven to map something not typically represented in the physical world and one that I find most difficult to articulate, my internal thought process.  Though the assignment was open-ended the limiting agent was technical ability. 

Ideas

I vacillated between doing something meaningful such as the disparity of services to children with disabilities or something I already have a strong grasp of the data such as the identification of a painting.

I was most interested in creating a visualization of a thought or an idea map that could not just illustrate the connection between different ideas and symbols that exist in an internal schema but also evoke the same sensation.

 

Thoughts on Maps

Thoughts on Maps

Harness the power of maps to tell stories that matter. ArcGIS StoryMaps has everything you need to create remarkable stories that give your maps meaning.

Click Here for the Story Map

Selecting the Mapping Tool

I played around with Prezi, Google Earth, ArcGIS, Esri Story Maps, and Tableau. 

My mapping goals were:

1. Be Interactive 
2. Display Photos with accompanying text
3. Be atmospheric
4. Link the ideas to be somewhat coherent while maintaining distance
5. Ability to overlap items on top of the map (this had to be abandoned)

With limited Java ability for Leaflet and the nausea-inducing effects of Prezi – I ended up using both ArcGIS Story Maps and Tableau. 

Designing the Map

I let the technology dictate how I would illustrate the structure of an internal thought process. Memory plays such a big part in the way we think about things that the narrative nature of the Story Map would provide needed structure.

I also approached the building of the map like a painting focusing on the palette and atmosphere instead of accurately depicting reality. In Esri I selected a base map
“Firefly Imagery Hybrid” for its dark appearance that could be like the internal world of the mind or even an MRI. 

Memories don’t usually include country or state boundaries so I removed them from the reference layer. I maintained the representation of streets and buildings as they are part of a sense of a place and one’s place in it.  

I structured the narrative somewhat autobiographically with places and thoughts on cartographic subjects such as the Center of the World, Internal Worlds, Stars, Models, the Human Body, Organizational Structure and tied them in with locations from my neighborhood, school, places I’ve traveled and worked. 

Still, I felt this was lacking and a Map of a Thought about Maps was far too meta even for me. 

I also created an infographic that is rooted in the present and future. For this I used Tableau. I found minimal data from “The Status of NYC Children” on the data.ccc.newyork.org website for services received by children in New York City’s Early Intervention Program, a federally mandated program that provides services to children with developmental delays and disabilities. I also utilized NYC Data to find demographic information on the population of children in each borough.

Problems

Being a novice in all of these platforms created a steep and time-consuming learning curve and the limitations in access as an unpaying customer in Esri limited a lot of the functioning I wanted. I was frustrated by the poor graphic design and editing features in Acris. I was not successful in putting what I wanted visually in the parameters of the mapping platform and was disappointed that the story progressed in a linear structure. 

For the Tableau portion, I was very restricted by the data shared by the government and non-profit agencies and could not report on the discrepancies that exist in the borough and racial demographics for children needing critical medical services. Other agencies reported FOIL requests for their dataset. I also had a lot of issues getting data from the census converted to zipcode and ended using the layer on Tableau. 

I also experienced self-censorship due to the permanence and public nature of posted assignments. I wish I had spent more time developing skills in one of the mapping platforms instead of first thinking about what I should do. I wish I had added many more data points for the map that went across the globe. Also, Google Earth may have been a better option for synthesizing that internal cinematic effect. 

Going Forward

I will be working on the data for Early Intervention Services and doing a FOIL request as this also relates to my professional life. I am still deeply interested in mapping ideas and want to focus more on the interactive element of the viewer and developing the technical skills to do so.