I’m finalizing our readings in Sound Studies/DH for next week, and I just received (as did many of you, I’m sure) a list of upcoming meetings of groups hosted by the GCDI. Among them is a “sound studies” group that may interest some of you, so I’m throwing it out there:

Sound Studies + DARC

Working on a Sound or Digital Archiving project? Come to the upcoming joint Sound Studies + Digital Archives Working Group meeting on Wednesday Nov 10 at 12pm! This is an opportunity to build community and learn together about designing a variety of different kinds of projects including audio production, oral history recording, podcasting, digital archiving and curation, web design, database management, and so much more!  Please join the Sound Studies and Digital Archives commons group to find out more  and get the zoom link for the meeting.

As you know, your second Praxis Project is due next week at class time. All students have chosen this option, so we’ll have a nice cluster of projects to talk about. First, here’s the procedure with a few tips:

• read this overview of text-mining.
• choose a text or set of texts (you might start with a pre-prepped corpus like the CCC corpus we looked at earlier or the EEBO corpus Witmore co-created and discusses), and explore with Voyant, Google N-Gram, J-Stor Text Analyzer, Bookworm, MALLET, or another text-mining tool.
• Third, explore! Even more than with the mapping project, this can be an exercise in playing around with a tool or tools and reflecting on “what happens” rather than the production of some kind of finished “project”: if you don’t believe me, look at the blog posts from prior students below
• Fourth, blog about your experiences. Here are some examples to guide you from prior students in 700:

• Matt Rubin’s comparison of Voyant, N-Gram, and J-Stor Text Analyzer. The mapping of different folkloric beasts in N-Grams
• Kevin Pham’s comparison of the same text (Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks) in English and French, to analyze the work of translation.
• Amanda Filchock on relationships within Alcott’s Little Women (using Voyant) and on the intensity of interest in the novel over time (Ngrams).
• Brianna Casatt’s project on transcripts from TV’s Buffy: the Vampire Slayer and Faihaa Khan’s on the Harry Potter series: somewhat similar attempts to explore verbal relationships within a single fictional “world.”

I’ve been thinking about our conversation last night about the arguably willful blindness to “invisible” infrastructure and logistical processes that characterizes our period. The brief conversation about history made me think of the “commodity” section of Emerson’s famous essay on Nature. There, Emerson celebrates the rise of new technologies that mirror and are consonant with natural forces–the steam engines that improve upon windpower and so on–and whose benefits are widely distributed for the general welfare.

Needless to say, now that it has dawned on us that we’re in the Anthropocene and that the benefits of tech don’t generally trickle evenly through the population, we find ourselves in very different place…

In a bit of kismet, the NYTs Wirecutter department featured an article on the Framework laptop, an attempt to build an eminently repairable laptop designed to last 10+ years. Dig in: it’s fascinating in an era dominated by Apple’s utterly opposite approach.

I’d like to try something a bit different tomorrow and wanted to tip my hand a little bit to get you thinking.

First, as mentioned previously, think of something to bring, or just a story to tell, about something you’ve fixed or hacked. It can be as simple as a mended shoelace or as complex as a broken website or bit of software.

Second, rather than march through the readings and sites as usual, I’d like to work more synthetically. So I’d like to break us into small groups for the first part of class and work on three separate questions, each of which might be addressed with several of the articles and sites on the syllabus. Might be a total fail, but might be really fun and inspiring. Here are the questions, which are also on this Dropbox Paper doc. We’ll use the latter to jot notes in our discussion tomorrow. You don’t need to do a thing before class, but I thought it might jog your thought process while reading to have these questions in your minds:

1. One of the foundational concepts of the traditional humanities is the “transvaluation of values” (Nietzsche), that is, a skeptical stance towards received ideas of the good, the moral, the beautiful, et al. and a boldness in imagining new and unprecedented scales of evaluation. What are some entrenched values that this weeks authors seek to “transvaluate” in Nietzsche’s sense? By all means suggest your own, but you might think about some of the following: innovation, disruption, novelty, progress. What terms recede in importance and what terms emerge to replace them in the authors’ analyses?
2. How do digital technologies and/or the digital humanities look different from the perspective of the Global South? How might close observation of “makers” and “inventors” in these “underdeveloped” spaces teach those of us in the “developed” world new approaches? How might humanistic study, and DH in particular, benefit from attention to seemingly marginal people and spaces who, in fact, comprise the global democratic majority?
3. What are some objects and processes discussed in this round of readings that are hard to see, hard to grasp, hard to comprehend? How do the readings/sites help us to think bigger or smaller or quicker or simply different? What research might emerge out of paying attention to ordinarily invisible aspects of our built landscape that ground the “clouds” we use in our everyday work and play?

As promised, here’s an overview of the DataVis Praxis project, due 10/21 for those who choose this option over the text analysis option due later this term.

Visualization Assignment (Due Date 10/21)

Create a data visualization using one of the tools described in “Digital Humanities Tools: Data Visualization Tools” (I suggest starting with Tableau Public or Palladio, especially if you are new to datavis). As with the mapping praxis assignment, you may create any type of visualization you’d like; I just want you to attempt working with one of these pieces of datavis software. Since we’ve already done a mapping praxis assignment, please avoid a geospatial visualization.

Please create a blog post describing your experience(s) creating the data visualization and connect your experience(s) with one or two readings from class thus far, particularly from the “Data and Visualization” week.

Examples from past 700 students:

• Elena Abou Mrad’s visualization of favorite cuisines in NYC
• Patricia Belen’s Drucker-inspired visualization of the objective impact of subjective events in the life of painter Artemisia Gentileschi
• Lane Vineyard’s graph of languages spoken by petitioners for bankruptcies in NYC
• Brianna Caszatt’s graph of duration of Supreme Court Justices’ terms: nicely iterative and process-focused narrativehttps://dhintro2020.commons.gc.cuny.edu/visualizing-supreme-court-justice-term-lengths/

Lots more to look at at the 2020 site if you want more examples.

Several of the pieces we’ve read this week–especially Drucker’s, Cottom’s, and Guiliano/Heitman’s–ask questions about the objectivity of “data” and its role in cultural analyses and narratives. These pieces made me think of a “golden oldie” of cultural theory, The Order of Things by the French poststructuralist thinker Michel Foucault, an enormously influential theory of how the West has constructed its own “ways of knowing” by obscuring the contingencies of certain knowledge and projecting a fantasy of a pure, objective knowledge.

The book begins with, you guessed it, a riff on Borges. Here is the first page more or less in full:

The point, of course, is not the obvious and chauvenistic one: what a zany people those Chinese are!? The point, rather, is more like “what must our Encyclopedias look like to the Other? How are our regimes that make “data” and its analysis seem so transparent and objective equally absurd and humorous and continent when looking in from the outside?

We’ll talk about the theory and practice of mapping extensively today, and we’ll look at some really compelling examples to guide us. I thought, however, that focusing exclusively on “industrial-grade” projects undertaken by teams of seasoned researchers (and sometimes teams of programmers and cartographers) might produce anxiety and give a false sense of our goals for this project.

So I’m linking to a few prior projects (from 2020). What’s valuable here is that each post includes a link or image of a finished map as well as a reflection on the process/product. This combination has several benefits for us:

• we can see what we’re aiming at in terms of ambition and scale in the actual object we’re buildling
• through the reflections, we can grasp why the student chose the platform and approach they worked with
• likewise, we learn what kinds of work/expertise were involved (some refer to prior knowledge of JavaScript, for example, whereas others state plainly that they wanted a simple tool)
• perhaps most important, we learn about false starts, dead ends, detours, and failures
• finally, we have some good models of how to write the blog post itself, which is part of the assignment.

With no further ado, here are a few examples:

• Allison Daugila’s map of yoga studios pre-covid: very simple and effective mapping in the wake of the economic impact of the pandemic.
• Brianna Caszatt’s map of cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens: plays with some of the “grammar” of maps explored in the “How to Lie” piece.
• Patricia Belen’s map of the nationalities of non-American artists at MoMA: interesting example of mapping something that’s often not obviously geographical in nature.
• Freddy Castro’s map (related to Daugila’s above) of the pre-Covid restaurant landscape of NYC
• Elena Abou Mrad’s visualization of the topography of Langston Hughes’s depiction of Sugar Hill in the poem “Harlem Sweeties.” This interplay between the territorial and the fictive/poetic is a rich vein to explore!
• Phil Agee’s “timeline experiment”: especially valuable for his thinking about process.
• Maggi Delgado’s memoirish map of her family’s migration from the Dominican Republic to the US. Great example of how static maps and mobile itineraries might come together.

Reading for class this week, I kept thinking of the wonderful story fragment “On Exactitude in Science” by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. In that story, Borges creates a made-up “discovered” text written by a made-up author from the 17th century reviewing the goings-on of a fictional and unnamed Empire. With me so far? The text describes the cartographic mania of that society that culminates in a map of the Empire at a scale of 1:1. We’ll talk about this at the beginning of class, but here’s the short story/fragment in full:

On Exactitude in Science
… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658

Borges, J. L. 1998. On exactitude in science. P. 325, In, Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (Trans. Hurley, H.) Penguin Books.

For Thursday, you’re responsible for your first blog post. The guidelines are simple: about 500-1000 words on one of the two following prompts:
* To what extent do these sites/projects reflect issues discussed in our readings?
* Or, If you were to center an understanding about what DH is around one of these projects/sites, how would DH be defined (or redefined)?