A overview on and reflection of the evolution of my final project

While I outlined the details and desired outcomes of my project proposal in the idea submission and class presentation, some aspects of my project, including the title, have since changed. Though most of the changes were minor, the process of drafting, outlining, and revising (many times!) various elements of the overall idea, have been critical in shaping the project trajectory and proposal that I submitted for this class and hope to continue developing, and eventually realize.

The most obvious change concerns the project name. Originally, I was referring to this as an archival project, however after much reflection on the goal of this project which focus on documenting and collecting conjunto music education materials, I felt the project is not so much an “archive” as it is an ongoing documentation and collection project. While the project certainly possesses elements and focuses similar to those of an archival project, such as the digitization and publication of conjunto artifacts, a major element of this project surrounds documentation, specifically referring to the production of previously undocumented works, mainly music transcription and notations. Thus the name eventually changed to “The Conjunto Music Documentation Project and Collection”, what I felt was a more appropriate title to highlight the two overarching focus areas: documentation efforts and collection efforts.

The scope of work and project team members also changed to address necessary work areas within the project. For example, the project staff did not initially include a metadata specialist. As I developed the scope of work for the project, it became apparent that specialized knowledge in metadata is necessary to realize a widely accessible online collection. This realization also helped shape the work plan, allowing me to address and expand on online cataloging and metadata requirements for the collection content. While I included a Legal Consultant form the initial stages of this project, I was unclear on the appropriate term for this role — that is, I thought perhaps this role would only be necessary for some phases of the project. As I developed the proposal, however, it became clear that a legal consultant would likely be necessary throughout the entire project timeline, and perhaps even in the ongoing development of the collection. From content acquisition, to the development of new content, legal complexities surrounding copyrights, ownership, media laws, and more may arise and a legal consultant would need to help navigate these situations. Furthermore, the development of the project helped identify which roles should be part of the ongoing development and maintenance efforts, versus roles that can or should have a fixed timeline. The Website Administrator, for example, will be an ongoing role to help maintain the online collection, while the researcher roles might be temporary or seasonal roles required mainly in the early phases.

The most notable realization, however, was the scope of the project, especially those surrounding ongoing efforts. It was difficult to elaborate on the project work plan and dissemination as it became more and more apparent that the project required many ongoing efforts and did not necessarily have a hard stop/end phase. The nature of this project calls for ongoing maintenance and development to ensure access and awareness. An entire department or team within the Conjunto Heritage Taller will likely need to be established to address these efforts. While they are concerning, especially in how they will shape the project budget and timeline, these discoveries are critical in bringing this project to realization — such concerns must be addressed if/when we are prepared to pursue funding and support for the project.

Overall, the evolution of the idea to proposal was extremely helpful in identifying project risks and challenges as well as outlining the true scope of this idea. It is a massive project that will likely require more developments before we are prepared to launch the first steps towards realization, but this entire process of drafting a proposal has been critical to preparing for that.

Exploring mapping beyond a focus on geographic elements.

Mapping, especially projects and work focused on demography, social, and socio-economic features, have always fascinated me. From straightforward maps of geographic elements to the representation of otherwise complex data against a geographic base layer, information truly comes to life in a way that is approachable and understandable to many non-specialists through mapping, revealing the innovative power in the art of mapping. As a powerful approach to analytics and representation, mapping goes far beyond working with geographic features. For me, the DAV program, and this course especially, have allowed me to explore mapping in ways that transcend what may seem like non-geo related topics and ideas.

Take, for instance, our first week class topic “Approaching the Digital Humanities” where we explored the project “Torn Apart / Separados” which draws on mapping as a tool to visualize immigration policy and incarceration data from 2018. The project reveals a network of affiliates, including government institutions, politicians, religious and non-profit organizations, who help sustain immigration detention centers and policies. With much, if not all, of the project data being widely accessible to the public, there are many opportunities to represent and analyze the data. Considering the vast amount of data used in the project, complexities in the data can result in a loss of important information when presenting it to an audience. Torn Apart / Separados, however, uses mapping as an approach to make sense of the information and organize complex, multifaceted information, ultimately showcasing the power, versatility, and beauty of mapping.

The Decolonial Atlas was another collection we explored this semester that showcases the versatility and power of mapping. The project overview highlights the collection’s use of mapping as a seemingly unconventional use of mapping, “[The Decolonial Atlas] is based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.” Many of the maps in the collection, for example, reveal patterns of segregation, applying mapping approaches to information and analysis that does not necessarily require the use of maps, thus showcasing the power in mapping as a tool to communicate an array of information, not only geographic information. As a large collection of maps that aim to challenge the common understanding of map projections, political borders, the understanding communities, and more, the collection utilizes mapping as a means of presenting important information, even information that is not necessarily geographic focused, that might otherwise get lost or overshadowed via other formats of presentation.

Learning about and exploring the versatility in mapping has driven me to explore mapping ideas and projects with subject-matter of particular interest to me, including topics that I may not have associated as appropriate for mapping! Some personal explorations include ideas and projects that are more obviously related to mapping, such as this project where I explored changes of demographic and socio-economic changes after historic designations in San Antonio neighborhoods:

I have also used mapping approaches even in non-professional or academic work, such as the quick observation amidst the power outages and 2021 Polar Vortex in Texas, where I shared some of my own thoughts through a side-by-side comparison of previously produced (not by me) maps on a social media platform:

However, in more abstract uses of mapping, I’ve explored ideas rooted in more social and cultural areas of focus, such as my mapping project, Mapping San Antonio’s Westside Sound. Because this started as an idea to explore and showcase the history and trajectory of San Antonio’s Westside Sound, I envision more elements to this project as it grows, but I am pleased to have incorporated this mapping element as I had not quite envisioned it in the early brainstorming stages.

While it can be used objectively, mapping as a tool for research, exploration, and presentation goes far beyond geographic work. With it’s power and versatility, mapping can, and should be, considered a tool for humanities work and projects throughout many areas of focus.

a reflection on our class discussions and readings surrounding responsibility and ethics in data visualizations, reporting, and representations.

Before and beyond the week wherein we read and discussed topics of data visualization, thoughts and concerns surrounding ethically working with data were brought up by many of us in the class, rightfully so, as our work throughout the semester involved data representation and digital projects. Misrepresentation, whether intentionally or accidentally, is a major issue when working with data, especially in the reporting phases, which can involve visualizations and other representations of data to an array of audiences. As a second-year student in the DAV program, I often find myself stressing over responsible analysis and representation, and the pattern of this topic recurring throughout the semester, in a way, confirmed my concerns as valid — this is absolutely a topic that deserves much conversation and attention.

Through discussions and readings, especially during the week of Data Visualization, there were a few ideas and thoughts that struck me as potentially helpful to keep in mind in my own work. Here, in a sort of reflection, I attempt to outline some of those ideas and thoughts that I try to keep in mind in my approach to new projects, analyses, and reporting. Of course, these ideas do not encompass all of the necessary steps to work ethically and responsibly with data, but they are certainly helpful.

Transparency in methodology and approach

Cottom’s piece “More Scale, More Questions: Observations from Sociology” highlighted some of the concerns in working on a research project to answer: Are there more interracial couples on television today than some unspecified past? — a seemingly straight-forward question. Many of the concerns Cotton mentions surround what constitutes a specific variable in the dataset they were working with, “I had to deal with the complexity of categories that are at odds with critical theory. For example, is a character on Grey’s Anatomy “black” because I interpret him as black, or because the show’s writers write the character as black, or because the actor playing the character identifies as black? My analysis relied in great part on ascribing race to visual data that had been captured as text without any consideration of what constitutes race.”

What stood out to me the most about this was the value in providing even a brief overview of the constraints, discrepancies, and issues of your dataset — much like some if the issues Cottom outlined in their research project — especially in the presentation/public facing/reporting phase of the work. This can not only be helpful to the audience, but also serve as a critical disclaimer of what can and cannot be discerned from the final product. At the very least, I feel, this establishes transparency in the project methodology. It is not to say that every project that involves datasets with constraints should be tossed out the window (that is unrealistic), but it is important to consider what sort of “disclaimers” can and should be provided to the audience for responsible data reporting.

Thoughtful design choice

In the “Visualizing Sovereignty” piece by Bonilla and Hantel, the authors discuss some thoughts on representing data. They explain “…we must thus think carefully about how representational choices in the use of color, sound, and format constitute rhetorical strategies. Building on, rather than abandoning, previous debates about textual representation, digital scholars must therefore remain attentive to how their narratives are plotted through the use of various representational formats and symbolic orders—even as they challenge them.” For me, this idea surrounding design choice is critical in shaping the direction and overall “success” of a project. To consider the ways in which our design choices might reinforce obsolete and/or problematic ideas, as complex and timely as this might be, is a very important step in the project process if we are trying to apply more ethical approaches in our work. This idea, in a way, encourages an analysis of the design choices and their appropriateness for the project and end goal.

Additionally, this approach reinforces the idea of transparency and the value it can bring to a project — explaining limitations can also spur new ideas and potential opportunities. Bonilla and Hantel explain, “For example, on the website Two Plantations, produced by Harvard University’s History Design Studio, the social history of enslaved families is diagramed through the use of family trees.²¹ The website shows both the possibilities and the limitations of adopting this graphic form to represent the lives of families whose structures of kinship were violently molded and could never be based solely on biological descent.²² As Vincent Brown suggests, even when they reach their limits these representational experiments can open up new questions about the most appropriate representational strategies for the material in question and can generate new questions by uncovering patterns and revealing challenges that were previously unperceived.”

Avoiding claims of accuracy

In Cottom’s aforementioned piece, they briefly mention Carwford’s and Boyd’s “Critical questions for big data”, wherein the two authors criticize claims of objectivity and accuracy as misleading. This argument is one that I personally support and keep in the forefront of my mind when performing analysis work and data visualization projects. A responsible approach to working with data calls for a commitment to high ethical standards in both the use of data and the way in which we communicate our results. Often, I feel, the communication of data analysis results is asserted in a way that can be very misleading to the lay audience, which can potentially be harmful, especially when analysis work often focusses on causality and estimations.

Perhaps this is a flaw in the world of data analysis and reporting, where there can often be problematic approaches to reporting results that can be misleading… Rather than asserting claims of objectivity and accuracy, I find it more valuable and critical to focus on [again] transparency in the approaches, methodology, and results. Specifically related to analysis work, it might be especially helpful to focus on how to clearly explain causality and estimations without misleading the audience to incorrectly interpret complete accuracy and objectivity. Ultimately, it is in the hands of the analysts reporting the outcomes and findings to choose ethical reporting approaches.

A look at conjunto music lyrics through a text analysis lens.

Some background

Before diving into the focus of my project, I thought it important to provide some context surrounding the project topic. First, I should probably answer, what is conjunto music? While my project initially aimed to address this question, I found that further development of the project is needed to provide a clearer definition to my audience. So, I share with you a description of the music from the organization that I currently work with:

“Conjunto — the traditional music of South Texas — dates back to the end of the 19th century. European settlers moved into the area with their button accordions and began ‘making music’ with Mexican settlers who favored the bajo sexto (a lower sixth bass guitar traditionally used in Norteño music). The results were magical, and became the signature sound of South Texas — particularly San Antonio.”

Conjunto Heritage Taller

The Corpus

Compiling a body of text was one of the most difficult and timely steps in this process. Because conjunto music has widely been taught and passed down via storytelling methods and performed “by ear,” there are many elements of the music that are not widely known or available, especially in digital formats — including lyrics. So, I spent much of the early process for this project performing online searches and collecting transcriptions and lyrics. To my surprise, I compiled a list of 54 songs — more than I thought I would be able to find considering the short window of time I had to do so. While this gave me a decent “bag of words” to work with, I hope to eventually develop this project with several more songs.

The sources were entirely web-based, consisting mostly of the “lyrics” provided directly on Google’s Search result page, but not all song lyrics were available in the first Google search. For quite a few songs, I had to dig deeper into websites such as Genius.com and Musixmatch.com or online forums, where conjunto fans provided the lyrics.

Disclaimers:

• All lyrics/text used in the project are in Spanish – Conjunto song lyrics are often in Spanish, with a few English versions, but I used songs with Spanish lyrics only, for a fair comparison (there would be much more Spanish lyrics than English ones – this would produce inaccurate outcomes)
  • Many popular conjunto songs are instrumental – this project explores conjunto songs with lyrics that have been transcribed and are available online.

Methodology

• Prepare text – I wanted to use Python or R for data prep/cleaning and then load the corpus into Tableau, but I ultimately decided to use Voyant for data prep and cleaning due to time constraints + my beginner level skills with R and Python.
• Specify Stop words – common stop words with no particular meaning, including articles, were removed from the analysis so that the words analyzed were meaningful. Below is a list of some of the stop words:

a, al, la, el, ella, el, yo, tu, he, etc.

Experience/Reflection

The focus of this project is to provide a high level overview of conjunto song lyrics, revealing underlying sentiments and themes, with the primary audience being people who are new to the genre and seeking insight on the style and history of this genre. After exploring the corpus with Voyant’s capabilities, though, I discovered that a deeper sentiment analysis and some form of time-series analysis might be required for the particular end-goals I had in mind (more on this later). With that said, I thought Voyant had some powerful features for other high-level exploration.

After specifying stop words, I was able to produce the above Cirrus visualization and term table, revealing the most frequently used terms in the corpus. Most of the top 10 terms may appear seemingly “positive” (sentiment) — translating to “love”, “life”, “desire”, “heart”, “man”, “soul”, “look”, “joy”, “angel”, “God” — however, in many of the songs within the corpus, the sentiment is actually “negative”, surrounding themes of heartache. While this visualization is interesting, more context is needed to provide a more accurate representation to people who are not familiar with the music.

The below collocate table to the right does a slightly better job at revealing more accurate sentiments and themes. Outlining terms that frequently appear in proximity of each other within the body of text gives a bit of context, in some cases, allowing for more accurate interpretation. For example, pairs #2 (“angel”, “return it/give back”) and #9 (“love”, “ungrateful”) might reveal some sense of negativity to users. This was probably my favorite Voyant feature, but still not quite accurate for a true sentiment analysis. Again, more context is needed.

Voyant seems to offer a type of sentiment analysis feature, allowing analysts/users to specify “positive” and “negative” categories, and while I was initially excited to use this feature, I quickly realized this too would require more context in order to avoid mis-categorizations and misleading my audience.

Ultimately, it seems as though any form of accurate sentiment analysis is not possible when treating each word within the corpus as just that — a single word, with no context. Perhaps other text analysis tools are capable of approaching sentiment analysis with phrases and context parameters for better results…

Other positives:

• Excellent handling of different language grammar – made it super easy to work with accent marks in my corpus, something I initially struggled with when trying to format my text for use in Python.
  • The idea behind the DreamScape feature is super cool (mapping the geographic references within the corpus to an actual map for visualization) but it has its drawbacks/quirks – many locations referenced within the corpus were not mapped, such as Tijuana, Minnesota, and Louisiana. If this were more accurate, it could be very insightful to people wanting to learn more about the roots of conjunto music, which are tied to South Texas and Mexico.

Other issues not related to Voyant:

• Inconsistencies in the use of accents (some transcriptions used accents while others didn’t)
• Small corpus – while I compiled a corpus of 54 songs, the wordcount was less than 8,000 after specifying stop words. I hope to continue this project, eventually compiling a much larger corpus.

Further Developments:

Aside from continuing to compile and clean a larger corpus for this, I think Voyant’s “Trends” timeline/line graph, could be very insightful in revealing trends and/or changes in conjunto music lyrics over time. Of course, this would also require organizing the songs in chronological order (which would likely prove to be yet another major issue considering the absence of proper documentation and details regarding these songs online), but something for organizations like mine to think about. Currently, the below line graph of “Trends” reveals nothing in terms of timespan because the songs are in random order (basically, in order of my search for them, which had no strategic approach other than the goal of finding lyrics).

Yesterday I attended the Asynchronous Interaction in Course Design workshop, facilitated by Seth Graves, a Carnegie Educational Technology Fellow at the GC. The workshop explored integrations of asynchronous engagement into online and offline course design. While the workshop was geared towards educators in undergraduate and graduate teaching and students who have engaged in online learning, I attended this workshop with hopes of learning about strategies that I could share with colleagues from my professional role. I do not teach, however I work for a non profit organization that develops and offers music theory curriculum and courses focussed on Conjunto music to our community. These music theory courses were scheduled to launch when the pandemic first hit, so the courses were re-formatted to be executed entirely online. With this unexpected teaching format, we have encountered some frustrations, so I plan to share some of the ideas and methods I learned in this workshop with my team as we continue to develop our music education programs online and, eventually, in-person.

Much of the focus throughout the workshop surrounded methods of increasing thoughtful engagement in an online classroom setting, however, many if the ideas can be applied to offline, in-person classroom settings as well. Some of the most helpful takeaways I noted are below:

Low-Stakes Communication:

• Generating asynchronous check-in spaces and deadlines to foster an environment wherein students can share ideas, feedback, and questions about each other’s ideas and work freely, that is, in a mostly informal setting. For example, a forum, shared document, or discussion board. Some useful tools are Slack, Google Docs, and Discord.
• Introduce flexible modalities through which students can engage. Some plugins like Talk and Comment and tools such as Voicethread allow students to share video and audio responses with each other.

Readiness:

• Ensure that students have all of the information and tools needed to participate in the class. Consider providing tutorials and helpful documentation if there is a learning curve with any of the integrations used in the classroom.
• Provide appropriate contact information if students should reach out to specific personnel for technical assistance.

Break Up The Content:

• Outline the material in sections to avoid presenting an overwhelming amount of information to students at one time. Depending on the course platform, the instructor may be able to break up the content into smaller sections. For example, a different WordPress for every week or section of content. The workshop facilitator, Seth, shared his own example that I found very helpful — as a student, it certainly feels easily digestable and not overwhleming to see the content broken up into different pages on a course website. I also want to call attention to the clarification and outlining of all tools needed for the course — an example of ensuring students have all of the information needed to participate in an asynchronous class.

Interrelating Course Material:

• Blog post assignments about the material (i.e. our posts in this course!).
• Brief comment-based prompts surrounding the class content.

Additionally, we discussed some common concerns of educators in online teaching environments. Most of the attendees shared frustrations surrounding assessment in asynchronous work. Below are some helpful tips provided by the workshop facilitator, Seth:

• Organize how you will assess your students by the stakes of the assignment.
• Avoid over-grading. Was it more important that the student practice?
• Avoid over-commenting. Can you organize your feedback into key ideas or revision tasks?
• Try rubrics. How can a rubric help you provide the right balance of feedback while helping with your time management?
• Try peer review. How can you incentivize quality feedback? (try this: give them guided peer review instructions)
• Seconding this: Offer short comment-based prompts about the content they just read.

Lastly, I wanted to share some of the other course platforms we discussed. Below are some of platforms and tools most commonly used amongst the workshop attendees, including myself (we use Google Classroom in my professional work):

Course Platforms:

• Hosting course site: WordPress (ex: CUNY Academic Commons), Blackboard, Google Classroom
• Hosting longform student writing: WordPress, Manifold

A look at the music through a spatial lens

For this praxis mapping assignment, I wanted to create a somewhat unconventional map that would visualize something that may not otherwise be mapped or associated with a physical geographic place. While my topic certainly references a physical location, I chose to incorporate places of the past and present that might visualize ties to areas outside of the specific place referenced in the title “The Westside Sound.”

My mapping project is to be incorporated into a larger project that aims to portray the story of Chicano Soul music with a focus on “The Westside Sound,” often thought of as the roots of Chicano Soul, referring to the Westside of San Antonio, Texas, where the music was born. I like to explain this niche genre as follows:

The Westside Sound is to San Antonio what Motown is to Detroit.

Considering my professional work surrounding Conjunto music (as the Program and Marketing Coordinator for Conjunto Heritage Taller), I aim to keep much of my graduate work within the realms of my interests and work with regional music and culture that is deeply rooted in my community — this mapping praxis assignment included. Derived from a mix of various musical styles, including some aspects of conjunto music, Chicano Soul was, and still remains, a prominent staple in San Anto history and culture. The intended primary audience is a broad mix of music enthusiasts, especially those interested in the styles that influenced and shaped Chicano Soul (i.e. R & B, rock n’ roll, Motown), as well as San Antonio locals and historians. A long-term goal for this project is that this serves as an archival project as well, documenting, recounting, and preserving the history of the Westside Sound.

The main narrative components of this project aim to communicate the following:

• Mapping the “Westside Sound” – a map of prominent venues, studios, radio stations, festivals, retailers, etc. that were/are significant to the musical style.
  • Details about the areas in which prominent artists/groups were formed.

Data

I collected the data for this project, using mostly methods of manual collection, organizing, and research. The data is mostly text and categorical with some quantitative/numeric values. Below are some variables I used:

• Coordinates (Lat, Long) of “significant places”
• Record Labels
• Venues
• Recording studios
• Nightclubs / Bars
• Record shops
• Date of “significant event”
• Photos, videos
• Addresses
• Descriptive text

Methodology

I decided to utilize the JavaScript library Leaflet for my map. After exploring different libraries and tools, Leaflet, by Mapbox, proved to be a good option to execute my map. I did however struggle with binding my data to Leaflet, so I used a very manual approach in my coding for the map by inputting my data for each point within my code. I want to investigate methods of binding data to Leaflet as this manual process is not ideal for larger datasets – luckily my dataset was simple and small. While Leaflet has tooltip and label features, the amount of data that I wanted to include in tooltips was not ideal for a small tooltip box. I eventually found a Leaflet plugin that allowed me to implement a sidebar. The sidebar feature was more suitable for the details I chose to reveal on user click, which included media filed and text. I was very pleased with this plugin and can imagine using it for future projects. For the legend, I used a D3 scale where my legend data was the domain and my chosen color palette was the range. I then appended circles to represent each style and text labels. Since the legend data was very simple, I was able to select colors that flowed well with my chosen color scheme of the whole webpage.

While I wanted to include many more geographic points my project, I did not have enough time to execute those ideas (the data collection, organization, and binding). The data collection process was very timely, since I was manually collecting and organizing the data myself, so I hope to identify more practical methods moving forward. Another aspect I hope to incorporate in my map is references to locations made in many Westside Sound songs.

For the less technical aspects, such as the title/cover photo at the top of the webpage, I utilized Canva.

Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold point out that the expanded field of DH includes several project types, methods, and practices. Their description stands true when centering the project/site “Torn Apart/Separados” to define DH, wherein several methods and practices are applied. The project also embraces Stephan Ramsay’s definition of DH, which he argues, must entail “building things.” While Ramsay strays from his original description that specifically called for the use of coding as a critical element in DH work, ultimately choosing the more general term, “building,” “Torn Apart/Separados” is heavily coding based, fitting either of Ramsey’s descriptions. Using “Torn Apart/Separados” as the primary descriptor of DH implies that DH is characterized by interactive and visual elements that are bound to data, information design, tool-building, collaboration, and other methods with an overarching theme of scholarly activism.

Upon entering the site, users are greeted with a brief project description, clearly outlining the “mission” of the project — to expand awareness on “culpability behind the humanitarian crisis of 2018.” The project reveals politicians and the various sectors that help sustain ICE, thus contributing to the humanitarian crisis. Additionally, the “Allies” page, strategically placed after the interactive, informational, and reflection pages of the site, establishes a sense of influence to take action against this humanitarian issue (activism). In doing so, the project touches on the theme of scholarly activism — an important characterization of DH if we are using this project to define the field.

The context of the “Allies” page and the information revealed in the interactive and descriptive pages of the project serve as a tool to users. The design of the site suggests users should explore the pages in the order presented at the top menu: Visualizations, Textures, Reflections, then Allies. This order first presents data and informs users of the project’s topic (Visualizations and Textures), then appeals to their emotions (Reflections), and finally alludes to some form of action in presenting contact details of organizations working to aid victims of the humanitarian crisis (Allies), where the users can use the information presented in previous pages of the project to take action. The tool-building component becomes an important element of DH work when centering this project to define DH.

The project’s interactive elements are the focal point, consuming most of the webpage space and revealing data on user actions such as hover or click. While most, if not all, digital projects – DH or other field – have elements of interactivity, this project reveals structured data and information that follows the scholarly activism theme to expand awareness on the project topic. Binding information and data to these interactive elements and applying design choices to make these interactive elements the focal point of the interface suggests that they too become a definitive factor of the project (and DH).

The project, as outlined in the “credits” page, was a collaborative effort of several team members and contributors. Additionally, the team behind the project called for reflections on the project from other scholars. These reflections are linked in the “credits” page, allowing users to review them – establishing a sense of transparency and applying, again, collaborative approaches to the project. The obvious and subtle efforts of collaboration throughout the project indicate that collaboration is a significant element of DH work.