My final project is an extension of my second praxis assignment. In the previous praxis assignment, I focused only on the crime rate and its trend over time. However, in addition to this superficial phenomenon, the final project will include the study on racially discriminative policing in law enforcement and the relationship between the crime rate and racial disparity in policing. This project also aims to share the results with the public. This final project reflection will discuss what I felt while designing this project and the expected challenges.

The most impressive thing I learned in this introduction to digital humanities class is that the digital humanities think of sharing knowledge and ideas as an important task. In fact, through the preparation for this project proposal, I recognized that there were not many attempts to disseminate knowledge to the public in my major, criminal justice. Knowledge was mainly being shared among researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in academic journal articles. There are small numbers of attempts to disseminate knowledge to the public. Still, most of them took a simple form, such as presenting statistics without any interpretation. Furthermore, there was little room for the public to engage in spreading knowledge. As criminal justice is related directly to the feeling of safety and the protection of life and property of all citizens, I think it is necessary to establish an open platform in which two-way communications between experts and the public are pursued rather than one-sided transfer of knowledge.

My project involves collecting, analyzing, interpreting, visualizing data, and building an Internet archive. One of the biggest challenges will be how to select the official crime data and how to interpret the analysis results. Since federal or state agencies have collected public criminal data, it is easy to use them without questioning their validity or reliability. However, looking behind the scenes, there are issues as follows: 1) how many crimes are not reported to the police, 2) whether police officers objectively input information about the crime incidents, 3) the statistics themselves are the reflection of the interests of a particular class in society, and 4) whether the statistics exacerbate bias or prejudice against the disadvantaged or minorities. The key to reducing these weaknesses is to remain critical eyes to the data. Creating an alternative to such official crime data would be nearly impossible. However, I think that whether I maintain a critical attitude will significantly affect selecting, analyzing data, and interpreting the results.

I do not believe that communicating with the public with an open mind and maintaining a critical perspective is limited only to the digital humanities. Rather, I think it is a spirit that I should always keep and pursue as a doctoral student and as a researcher in criminal justice.

While preparing for the final project, one of the biggest concerns was how to incorporate a humanistic perspective into my project, as I have been familiar with the social science perspective. Especially, I have analyzed various crime data and demographic statistics since I started my doctoral program. However, I hardly ever doubted the validity and credibility of most data because the government and institutional agencies collected them.

I have learned that a continuous question about what the story underlying the data was and where the data came from was at the center of critical thinking. Especially, while I prepared for my final project, I re-read Drucker’s Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display (2011) and re-thought its meaning. The two sentences below in the conclusion of the piece inspired me:

The abandonment of interpretation in favor of a naïve approach to statistical certainly skews the game from the outset in favor of a belief that data is intrinsically quantitative – self-evident, value neutral, and observer-independent.

I am suggesting that we rethink the foundation of the way data are conceived as capta by shifting its terms from certainty to ambiguity and find graphical means of expressing interpretative complexity.

First, these two sentences directly criticized how I have been doing statistical analysis. Second, the argument above provided helpful guidelines on my attitude when dealing with data in my future project. Of course, as a doctoral student, it would be nearly impossible to create an alternative to the massive amount of crime data collected by government and research institutions. However, I think that maintaining critical eyes will significantly impact selecting and analyzing data and interpreting the results.

What I have done so far was reading numerical data and statistics and interpreting the result superficially, such as “the crime rate increases in certain communities,” “illicit drug use influences the crime,” and “the low level of self-control is the cause of the crime.” I do not think this way is sufficient for me as a doctoral student and a would-be researcher. In addition to the technical abilities to handle data and run software programs, I should have a keen eye to find and analyze serious problems underlying our society, such as discrimination, inequality, and alienation. For example, there are many issues that I can research from a different perspective what I have done so far: 1) why criminals choose to commit crimes, 2) why crimes are concentrated in a particular community or area, 3) what events in their life-courses make them criminals, and 4) some become criminals, and some do not even though they are under similar circumstances.

In sum, it is crucial to take the data actively rather than take them as given. One of the important lessons learned in Drucker’s reading and this class is that it is essential to have a critical perspective, be intellectually curious, and ask “why” continuously.

In Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities, Todd Presner, following Alan Liu, argues that the digital humanities remains caught in a materialist epistemology that focuses on the activities of building and making that seems to put it at odds with the humanistic tradition of critique. The focus on new digital methods of humanistic work has taken a privileged place over “attention to the conditions of their possibility, their social and culture contingency, and finally, their transformative potentiality” (Presner, 59). He points out that technical tools and methods are always situated within organizations of power that set the limits of resistance and accommodation in what is or is not allowed in the scientific practice at hand. Thus, we need some form of interpretation and that passes through modes of analysis like Foucauldian genealogy and Frankfurt school critical theory to scope out the limits of what we do in the digital humanities, a scoping out that not only limits, but also reveals new possibilities for the digital humanities that would not have been possible before.

Since Presner published this chapter in 2015, it seems like there has been a lot more work done in this spirit. In the successive editions of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, from 2012 to 2016 to 2019, there has been a shift to a more culturally critical lens. It seems as though the field is no longer content with merely tacking questions of power, race, and gender onto to discourse on the field after the fact, but rather is making a critique based on these vectors central to the field itself. There are lots of writings about how digital tools and methods reaffirm structural biases or contribute to state surveillance or do violence toward indigenous people through archiving their culture.

There seems, at this point, to be an abundance of thinking through the digital humanities in light of critical theory. What appears to be missing the first part of the the culture of critique that Presner writes is missing from the field. He writes of the “Marxist-inflected social and cultural criticism”, “deconstructive critique”, and “Enlightenment ideals of rational subjects engaging in critique”, but it is only the first two that I see serious thought put into (Presner, 55). It seems like a problem with the humanities as a whole is a neurotic focus on the social conditions of experience and what we have lost is a more phenomenological epistemology that investigates the somatic and spiritual dimensions of life. Any epistemology and critique of digital humanities work would be incomplete without both of these parts of the critique: the socio-historical and the phenomenological. The structures of power are obviously essential, but we must understand how they produce and reproduce behavior through understanding how the psychosocial circuits they construct actually work.

This bears resonance with the points made by Bernard Stiegler in a lecture on the digital humanities that he delivered in 2014. He argues that we need to rethink the digitalization of knowledge in light of the Husserlian phenomenology of knowledge, especially since the Derridean critique of Husserl. Even the distinction Presner makes between the materialist epistemology of building and making in DH and the mental work of interpretation and critique reflects a repeating of the binary between mind and body that Western philosophy has been deconstructing since Hegel. It reflects the lack of a deeper engagement with the history of philosophy that might reveal that all academic and theoretical work has been conditions by technical constraints, and that digitalization would only appear as a transformation of that relationship. I think that Presner opens up an important conversation here, but one that needs to be taken further. This is obviously beyond the scope of this blog post, but it is one I believe to be essential if the digital humanities is to be able to rethink “the public sphere and knowledge systems…while also imagining possibilities for meteorological knowledge rooted in an ethic of participation without condition” (Presner, 56).

Stiegler’s lecture: https://www.academia.edu/12692243/Bernard_Stiegler_Digital_Humanities_2014_

For my final project, I chose to propose a distant reading of two texts by the late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. It is proposed to be a vector semantic analysis of the concept of value in the context of the Anthropocene in his texts. It will establish a distributional relation among the concepts as well as use an analogical operation to uncover new semantic possibilities in the text that might allow us to rethink political economy. I chose to do this project following three threads most important to me during the semester studying digital humanities.

The first was inspired by Ryan Cordell’s How Not to Teach Digital Humanities. The most important takeaway from that piece for me was his assertion that we digital humanists need to approach research and pedagogy from the perspectives of our own special disciplines. He argues it is best to not approach digital humanities as a monolithic enterprise, but rather seek how digital techniques and tools can be incisive and decisive in specific humanistic disciplines. Until reading this piece, I was feeling somewhat discouraged about the field. I had yet to discover what I thought was so exciting about doing digital humanities, and this discourse made me realize that the burden was on me to investigate what kind of work I thought was important to do.

The second thread is intimately related to the first for me. It is that initiated by Michael Witmore’s Text: A Massively Addressable Object, which formed much of the theoretical backbone of my project proposal. In this blog post, he situates distant reading as both continuous with previous forms of reading while also considering what is different about it. He has inspired me to think about the way in which and the scales at which we address text in the philosophical world. I believe it is only by doing this that we could think about how text could be massively addressed via computation. Thus the overlap with Cordell’s point. I began to think about the way that philosophy has always addressed its history since at least Hegal and how that history can be addressed computationally.

The last was a thread that I felt was an undercurrent throughout the entire semester, which was the playful hacker ethos of the digital humanities. I changed the method of distant reading I was going to be working with only two weeks before the deadline for the final project. In this two weeks, I had to submerge myself in the world of vector semantics and word embeddings and start to play around with these new ideas and methods. I had to stumble around in the dark and become familiar with something completely other to me. During this process, I experienced something that I also experienced while doing the praxis assignments. It felt like digital humanities was less a field of digital and humanities experts, but rather humanists who were digital explorers. This is an ethos I would like to continue to chase throughout the rest of my time in the program.

What is the digital humanities’ role in the realm of digital education? What contributions can digital humanists make to increase the likelihood that the future of digital education will not be dystopian?

Mary Aiken is a cyberpsychologist who, in part of her research, studies the effect that digital technology has on human beings psychologically and behaviorally. She does this from the standpoint of environmental psychology, resting on the premise that, with the advent of digitalization, it is the environment of education that changes, and it is this new environment that calls us into questioning these changes. At the 2021 CUNY IT Conference, she was posed with the question of the conference’s theme: is the future of digital education utopian or dystopian? She answers by disagreeing with the formulation of the question in the first place. She argues that digital technology can either be used well or poorly by humans, and that the same is true concerning digital technology in higher education. It is in this openness, this radical ambiguity between the two poles of the potential within digital space, that the digital humanities can and must intervene in productive ways.

The question of whether the future of digital education is utopian or dystopian is essentially, according to Aiken, up to us. Thus, we need to ask ourselves the question, “how can we get the most out of the educational process in this rapidly changing environment?”. Aiken’s research has shown that digital technology has a tendency to amplify the behavior of people interfacing with it. This means it has the capacity to make people more altruistic, but it also has, as in the case of internet trolls, the capacity to make individuals more narcissistic, Machiavellian, sadistic, and psychopathological in other ways. So what are the ways in which digital technology can make education specifically more dystopian? She argues that education was moving in a trend towards digitalization and the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this trend. In this acceleration, these threats have been made more apparent to us. Here were the main drawbacks she laid out as obstacles we need to address:

• Digital technology adds to students’ already excessive screen time
• Not all students have equal access to technology
• Devices can be distractions that can disrupt the learning process
• Data privacy issues
• Greater potential for cheating in the classroom
• Digital technology can disconnect students from social interactions
• Institutional lack of IT support makes it hard to evaluate and implement new classroom technologies
• May diminish cognitive development and reduces problem solving skills
• Maintaining modern technology is expensive
• Requires labor-intensive lesson planning
• Heavy institutional demands on IT systems.
• Less employment, underpayment, potential replacement of teachers through automation

It is in the context of such concerns that digital humanities can contemplate some of these things, as well as devise technical solutions. Furthermore, there is something that Aiken mentioned in passing that I wish to take note of for digital humanists (and humanists more broadly). In talking about the benefits of digital technology (she did not only speak of drawbacks), she mentioned that it lends itself to professors being guides or facilitators rather than content experts. And this, she claimed, is reason for us to re-consider what it means to educate in the first place. This is not just a question for psychologists, university administrators, and actors in the EdTech marketplace to answer. These are the kinds of bigger questions about the non-quantifiable elements of life that humanists have always been tasked with. In a world that devalues the humanities, this is an opportunity for humanists to reevaluate the values of their own disciplines while intervening in real-life local situates that have immense social and political consequences.

However, if anything was clear from Aiken’s talk, it is that we do not yet have the research we need on the effects of digital technology on learning, and it is only through this research that we can resist the destructive tendencies of digital technology and transform education for the better. Aiken says that we need an evidence-based approach that can inform future uses of technology. Once we have better data (and better access for students around the globe), we can better implement tools and strategies for the digital world. Part of this project involves predicting new technologies and how they would be best implemented us. She reminds us that the COVID pandemic revealed the necessity of this, for we found ourselves in a situation we academics were not ready for. In this realm, she points to the revolutionary capacity of virtual reality technology. Virtual reality situates a computer-generated educational environment that is believable, immersive, and interactive. This kind of technology could address many of the concerns surrounding remote learning.

The job of the digital humanities, then, is to utilize this research in light of our own native humanities disciplines to address these new digital techniques in tools as they relate to humanities questions like truth and justice. The digital humanities’ transdisciplinary nature is perfect for this work.

While writing the paper, I ended up consulting with my mother on the phone in regards to how to properly approach my project about her family history, and to learn more about what her parents experienced growing up during Japanese occupancy in Taiwan. I felt a little stunted on writing out a step-by-step semester project, as I realized I also needed to include interviews with those outside of her Native Taiwanese family– those whose parents migrated with Nationalist Party in the 1950s. She told me her father has early memories of hearing bomb sirens and having to run with his family into a bomb shelter when he was 5 years old. Given his trauma with war, he is the only one in her family who does not favor independence if there is a violent war in exchange.

When I asked her about her mothers experience growing up, she told me she a very different opinion given that her brother was a victim of “White Terror”– a period of political repression on the civilians imposed by the Kuomintang Part when they migrated from Mainland China after the Chinese Communist Party won. She told me her younger brother had been arrested at the age of 19 because he attended a book club meeting at the age of 16, unbeknownst to him that several of his friends identified as socialists, and so by association he was charged with “conspiring against the Nationalist Party”. When I asked her how long he spent time in prison, I expected maybe 4-5 months locked in a jail cell, but she casually responded he spent 10 years in a concentration camp. She mentioned that he is still alive residing in Taipei, and is a former author who’s published several books. But she couldn’t remember his name at all.

When I looked online for any results for ‘white terror taiwan author’, I ended up finding a detailed interview he gave to the author Julie Wu, who graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in Literature, on the second page of Google.

https://thediplomat.com/2014/03/-taiwans-white-terror/

In it she details his life at the concentration camp “New Life Correction Center” on the island Hue Sho To– now called Green Island– where he spent 10 years doing physical labor for his ‘crimes’– crimes in which he was tortured into confessing. She states he offered to do the toughest jobs in order to “strengthen his weak constitution”, so while he spent the days making rice for prisoners which required carrying 60-80 kilogram buckets of water, he spent the nights teaching himself English and teaching his illiterate bunkmate, Huang, to read Chinese.

The part of the article that threw me off was that after he served his 10 years at the concentration camp, he returned home to be greeted by his mother and sister, only to learn that his father committed suicide one year after his arrest. He says he blamed himself for his fathers death, believing that if he had been a tougher, stronger boy, his father would not have worried so much about him.

“This is why I hate myself,” he says now.

My mother informed me that his mom, her grandmother, couldn’t handle the grief of losing her husband and son in such a short period of time and being left to take care 9 children as a single mom in Japanese occupied Taiwan, and for that reason has attempted suicide multiple times. But in the end, kept going.

Towards the end of the interview, he recalls rekindling with his childhood crush and finally joining in marriage. And though there were dark times when a flood destroyed his headquarters, leaving his company bankrupt and depriving his friends (who he hired from his same concentration camp) of their income, he left his newborn son with his sister-in-law and headed to the seashore with his wife to drown together. Fortunately, the sister in law stopped them before anything could happen.

His name is Tsai Kunlin. I still haven’t been able to find books that he has published online, but even if this project never comes into fruition, I feel a sense of obligation to tell his story given the small connection I have with him, even if it’s a few degrees apart.

Felicity Howlett

Here we are at the end of our term, and we have never met in person. I feel comfortable and grateful for our online encounters. This digital era we live in—making it possible for us to share time together even when we have never been in the same room.

            I have contradictory feelings about digital life. Zoom has been a salvation, an opportunity to talk, listen, learn, visit, and continue relationships. But if my cell phone rings when I am walking along in silence, I feel I have been accosted and would rather jump on the thing than answer it. I cling to my landline. I’m probably clinging to its knees—or ankles. Most likely it is on its way out the door.  

            This class has been a wonderful and enlightening even if I encountered some rocky moments during my first dips into mapping, text mining and visualization. I hope I am beginning to understand something about what it means for us to have so much information available as well as so many ways to explore it! Just having online access to the libraries—having information downloadable at our fingertips and/or wandering around a subject with Zotero, netting the information like a butterfly chaser, is beyond compelling.  

            My final project aims at encouraging the stated interest of the digital humanities community to extend its reach beyond academy walls with a plan to activate the potential for electronic participation for people who are confined to their living quarters. Whether such isolation is caused by fragility, a specific handicap, or a chronic condition, such individuals are often overlooked as they are unable to enjoy in-person opportunities for social interaction. The hope is to create a website embedded with Zoom that will serve as the address for a weekly music program. In a Zoom room, people will meet one another, share in the music, participate by singing along and engaging in discussion.  Although I forgot to mention size in my final project, I imagine that a pilot program would not involve more than ten or twelve participants.

            I see three different areas that would benefit from digital community input:   

            1) Website design, program planning, and a pilot program.

            2) The “latency” issue (The time it takes from signals to travel from the sender to the receiver).  Latency problems create asynchrony, making it nearly impossible for people to sing together in an ensemble if they are not together in one location.  [Ways to get around this issue have been devised and are workable.]

            3) Creative design ideas and/or models for people who might need special assistance to participate such programs.  Siri, Alexa, and other virtual assistants have enabled some people with handicaps to operate independently in ways that that were not imagined possible not so long ago. Learning what other assistance people need will be discovered on an individual basis.

            The goal for next semester is to accomplish the plan as described in the first item, but you never know when knowledge and inspiration might spill into something beneficial for items 2 and 3. 

            With best wishes to all for a healthy, peaceful, happy, and fruitful new year!

.

This final project took me on a roller coaster ride. I will admit that I had too many ideas and had trouble narrowing down what I would ultimately focus on; however, every time I thought I finally settled on a topic something deter me from the idea. 

One key point of my project didn’t change which is the connection to community college. After presenting my proposal to the class, I decided my project would be on creating a webpage that would highlight information expressing the benefit of attending community college.  

Boy was I thankful for the environmental scan portion of our proposal. I had originally thought I reviewed everything, however unfortunately it didn’t cross my mind to see if CUNY had any content on their webpage. As I was still in the early stages of the project the idea to check popped into my head, and there it was https://www.cuny.edu/admissions/twoyear-degrees/ a webpage that I was essentially envisioning for my project proposal. This made me rethink how I should proceed with the project. I remember one suggestion when selecting a project is expanding on current work. Therefore, that’s what I chose to do; the goal of my project is to expand and reorganize the two-year degree webpage to entice students to enroll in community college.

While hiccups like rethinking the final project were stressful, I really enjoyed the course and assignments. I was pushed out of my comfort zone when working on each praxis and even the final project. I have limited knowledge of coding and I don’t consider myself a big reader, but that’s why I enjoyed working on the praxis, the area was new to me.

I did have a couple of concerns given this is my first semester, and it was online. One concern was that I wouldn’t feel like I would be able to contribute to class discussions. I was happy that that wasn’t the case, and it was due to the openness of the discussion. It was nice to be able to hear others’ thoughts and connect with them. Lastly, while the course was online, and I had no clue what to expect, the class overall was approachable, and I was still able to connect with classmates in and outside of the classroom. 

What intrigued me to join the DH is the Digital Pedagogy study. Needless to say, I was excited about our readings on Pedagogy. What stood out to me the most was our reading “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities“. 

“We pair “digital” with “humanities” and feel we have something revolutionary, but for our undergraduate students the word “digital” is profoundly unimpressive. Their music is digital. Their television is digital. Many of their books and school materials are and have always been digital. To brag that our humanities (or our liberal arts) are digital is to proclaim that we have met a base requirement for modern communication. It would be like your bank crowing that you can check your account online. Of course you can. At this point, you would only notice if you could not do so.” 

This quote stood out to me because it’s true we are living in a world where we have come to expect many if not everything to be digital. When I read about the bank account, I related way too well to this quote. One of my accounts had the app and had Zelle way before the other. By the time my other bank account provided me the app, all I could say to myself is finally! 

However, although we are surrounded by technology it doesn’t mean everyone is tech-savvy. This quickly became obvious during the pandemic when we had to rush to be remote. My program helped both students and teachers get acclimated to their new learning/teaching life. I also had the opportunity to be a part of a research team focused on “lessons learned”. One of those lessons is that both teachers and students had different levels of comfortability with technology. 

I immediately thought about these “lessons learned when reading “The necessity of such scaffolding brings us back to the mistaken notion of the “digital native”—a notion, I would argue, that leads to frustration for both students and teachers. The idea that our students must have innate technological skills because they have grown up in a computer-saturated world is equal, to my mind, with assuming all drivers must be excellent mechanics or auto designers because they have spent so much time behind the wheel or, perhaps more germanely, assuming all students must be innately gifted writers because they have grown up around books and paper.” Both teachers and students play the blame game.  

After this reading and after attending workshops, what I came to realize is that there may already be work implemented that is considered digital pedagogy. As Cordell recommends, the idea is to start small and integrate when possible. Be sure to scaffold, because it’s not evident that all students will comprehend; lastly, think locally. 

As the year comes to a close, I am sure all of us have had moments of growth and learning that we can bring to the new year.  

Throughout this semester, I was wondering what my final project should be about. As I was wandering about my native city of New York, and in the Bronx, I looked around and saw a garden right next to where I live. I asked the question? Do my fellow neighbors frequent this place? I barely did it myself. The Digital humanist in me quickly wondered if I could find a list of community gardens in the entirety of the Bronx and to my excitement, I was able to quickly find two types of data visualizations. First I was able to find a City funded program called Greenthumb in where they, with volunteers, maintain and keep these gardens functional as well as have a beautiful Geospatial map visualization of all the gardens in NYC. A Screenshot is below:  

The second item I found was an opendata Excel sheet with all the metadata of these gardens.  

It included name, borough, address and even community district.  

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/dataset/GreenThumb-Garden-Info/p78i-pat6/data

With these data points I thought of a question for a project and what came to mind was if I was able to create a project in where I can collect data on how much edible surplus is available to choose from. I couldn’t find anything of the sort online and I decided this was a fun thought experiment to work with!  

As I started working on my project, many of our readings came to mind but what really struck me was the seven principles of data feminism. “Consider context. Data feminism asserts that data are not neutral or objective. They are the products of unequal social relations, and this context is essential for conducting accurate, ethical analysis.” (2020)  

 In the case of my project, I also try to see the context behind data and try not to see as “food being stolen” but as what can we do with any surplus of vegetable. If this project were to be funded, I would say this can help bring community awareness to items that already exist using data.  

Really amazed by everyone’s projects and how everyone, including Professor Gold was so accommodating to our needs. Looking forward to next semester! Enjoy your holidays everyone!