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.

When reading about text mining, one of the first issues that stood out to me was the notion that text mining for DH seems to be a method that allows reinforcement of ones own biases, and is not always scientifically objective. It allows us to make connections and correlations with data we extract from texts, however the methods to extract data are not always replicable to achieve the same results. I’m mainly thinking about method used by Matthew Jockers, stylometry, which is “the statistical analysis of variation between one writer genres and another”. He used it to analyze variations between ‘male’ and ‘female’ writers of novels, however it became increasingly problematic in identifying feminine and masculine styles of writing. The issue about using a dataset spanning over 200 years is that one has to consider that gender associations change over time, and since gender is a social construct it therefore changes as society changes. The results are that Jockers has confirmed not an objective reality, but the premise of his own studies.

One example of data mining I’ve looked at is an analysis for the show Seinfeld. In an effort to understand the popularity of a show that is specifically about upper middle class people in New York City in the 80s, and how it has connected with so many people across time, they used data mining from the script to see any patterns over 9 seasons. Ultimately I found the findings not as interesting as I thought I would. It’s hard to find nuance and complexity through a shows script that is technically about ‘nothing’ and the banalities of everyday life. Link

It’s difficult picking a topic for text mining, knowing that I might partake in another method of reinforcing my own biases through a set of texts. One of my attempts of text analysis was a single article I found in JSTOR when researching the artist Balthus, who I researched for my senior thesis while attending Pratt. After learning that one of his paintings, Thérèse Dreaming (1938), stayed on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art after Mia Merrill created a petition to convince the museum to remove the painting from gallery 907, or at least provide ‘more context’, (Link) I was curious to learn how some scholars interpreted Balthus body work. In her petition, she says “I was shocked to see a painting that depicts a young girl in a sexually suggestive pose… It is disturbing that the Met would proudly display such an image… The Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children.” (Link) I decided to just use one text (‘The Virtues and Dangers of Connecting Art to Life: can Pragmatism Address Balthus?’ by Mary Magada-Ward) to analyze and see what came up as a result.

Words I had to manually block out were: art, balthus, balthus’s, 05, 25.1_03_magada, ward.indd, 146.96.128.36, downloaded, university, fi, jsp, 2021, 02, about.jstor.org, https.
I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of the results. Words like girls, aesthetic, young, experience, philosophy, ethical, and speculative all made sense when describing Balthus’s overall work, but I didn’t really understand the point of text mining using this article.

My next attempt was to use the first 5 articles that came up when Googling “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder”. The idea mainly came to be when I realized most of my knowledge about mental health came from online resources using the Google search engine, through mental health blogs and articles, and less from mental health professionals directly. This only became problematic to me when I started to question who were the authors of such blogs. Are self-help gurus a credible source when dealing with mental health? Are they representing a correct ‘ideal’ and ‘successful’ person who handles their mental health responsibly? And am I achieving that goal? An excerpt from The Culture of Narcissism (1979) by cultural historian Christopher Lasch explains it better:

“The mass media, with their cult of celebrity and their attempts to surround it with glamour and excitement, have made Americans a nation of fans, moviegoers. The media give substance to and thus intensity narcissistic dreams of fame and glory, encourage the common man to identify himself with the stars and to hate the ‘herd’, and make it more and more difficult for him to accept the banality of everyday existence.

To the performing self, the only reality is the identity he can construct out of materials furnished by advertising and mass culture, themes of popular film and fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural traditions, all of them equally contemporaneous to the contemporary mind.

In order to polish and perfect the part he has devised for himself, the new Narcissus gazes at his own reflection, not so much in admiration as in unremitting search of flaws, signs of fatigue, decay. Life becomes a work of art, while ‘the first art work in an artist’, in Norman Mailer’s pronouncement, ‘is the shaping of his own personality.'”

– Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (1979)

How is the media portraying the ‘ideal’ mentally healthy person? Am I constructing an identity furnished by mass culture– through themes of popular film and fiction? One example of how mental health classification can affect culture is when the DSM-II, first published in 1968, listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. The World Health Organization only removed homosexuality from its ICD classification with the publication of ICD-10 in 1992. Had it not been removed from the DSM, how would those who don’t identify as heterosexual deal with their perceived ‘mental illness’?

Even after this search I wasn’t sure what the results meant. I think a lot of what I wanted to explore shouldn’t use the text mining method. Text mining is probably best used to categorize documents, or trace history of particular features (words or phrases) over time. I’m also hesitant about results from text mining, as I don’t want to repeat what Jockers did, which was confirm a premise of his own studies rather than an objective reality.

While reading ‘See No Evil’, I was reminded how out of the loop employees are in terms of where product comes from while working retail. Working through the pandemic, it was difficult to answer customers questions of “where the food is” when we were experiencing the panic-buy phase, where hundreds of dollars worth of groceries were purchased by a massive swarm of scared customers. The company I specifically work for allows certain employees at the store to keep track of sales in grocery section, allowing them the responsibility of ordering just the right number of product for days worth of sales for the specific store. When the store received a wave of panic buying, we were unable to meet the demands a city that is about to quarantine. In fact, even though we had access to order a specific amount, we were indeed out of the loop of how farmers and workers in manufacturing facilities were dealing with an increased demand.

“This peculiar state of knowing-while-not-knowing is not the explicit choice of any individual company but a system that’s grown up to accommodate the variety of goods that we demand, and the speed with which we want them. It’s embedded in software, as well as in the container ships that are globalization’s most visible emblem.”

Grocery stores across the country gained a large increase in profit during the pandemic, however workers operating these stores were left in the dark. Retail workers were left to deal with a swarm of customers hoarding food for quarantine, while some the workers themselves could not afford to quarantine themselves, as the luxury to work from home was not an option. I am still hopeful that retailers will recognize the kind of labor it takes to run a store while understaffed and, in my opinion, incapable of providing a safe working environment for its fellow employees given the circumstances.

Having lived in Taiwan for 2 years when I was 5, and taking family trips throughout middle school and high school to Taiwan to visit my grandparents and uncles on my mothers side, I recently became curious about Taiwan’s sovereignty and the political tensions with Republic of China that continue on until this day. My mother has described tensions between a friend who has insisted that she is Chinese, just like them, despite the fact that she identifies as Taiwanese.

However, it was not known to me until years ago that there are indigenous people of Taiwan who are still seeking recognition from Taiwan and China. On January 16, 2016, Tsai Ing-wen won the presidential election of Taiwan with over 56% of the vote. It signaled a turning point in Taiwan’s democracy, and Tsai accepted the “will of the Taiwanese people”. She became the first Taiwanese leader to officially apologize to the island’s indigenous population, acknowledging that past governments had failed to implement the indigenous peoples’ basic law. The indigenous people’s basic law that was passed in 2005 was to grant a wide range of rights to indigenous residents, and promised progress during her administration.

There are about 400,000 aboriginals in Taiwan, making up about 2% of 22 million population. While researching the tribes, it was noted that the official classification schemes originally developed by Japanese government anthropologists centuries ago, so some classification names are rejected by the tribes themselves. The Taro (also known as Sediq) people reject the classification to be the ‘subtribe’ of Tayal (also known as Atayal), and the Tao tribe reject the name “Yamei” given to them.

There are 16 tribes officially recognized by the government (up from nine originally). The 16 are:  Amis, Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun, Puyuma, Rukai, Tsou, Saisiyat, Yami, Thao, Kavalan, Truku, Sakizaya, Sediq, Hla’alua and Kanakanavu.

In addition, there are still more tribes seeking recognition, including many Pingpu tribes who formerly lived in the plains regions of Taiwan.

During my research, it became apparent to me that mapping the movements of tribes through colonization from the Portuguese (1626 – 1642), the Dutch (1624 – 1662), the Ming Dynasty (1662 – 1683), the Ching Dynasty (1663 – 1895), the Japanese (1895 – 1945), and finally the Republic of China– would prove to be difficult if I were to do it justice. Also the idea of trying to map tribes who’s classifications came from Japanese government anthropologists centuries ago, and who’s classifications are still being debated today in order to gain recognition from the current Taiwanese government, would be confusing and problematic to say the least.

I also noted that in some of the current existing maps locating indigenous tribes, certain tribes have different spelling variations, whereas certain tribes were not mentioned at all.

Unsatisfied with the google searches, I called my dad, who studied Chinese history in college, inquiring about any books he has on the colonization of Taiwan. He sent me several maps from books, however most Taiwanese maps he found displayed the Aboriginals locations during Japanese occupancy.

The book he sent me The Island of Formosa Past and Present by James W. Davidson, included a chapter that went into great detail the colonization by the Dutch, so instead of mapping out the Indigenous tribes I decided to map out the Dutch expeditions, starting 1624, and the Spanish. I decided to map out the the travels of the Dutch from Batavia (present day Jakarta, Indonesia) and the Spanish from the northern harbors of the Philipines.

Link to Map “Dutch and Spanish Colonization of Taiwan”

In the book The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, he states in his intro:

“Typography is the art and craft of handling these doubly meaningful bits of information. A good typographer handles them in intelligent, coherent, sensitive ways. When the type is poorly chose, what the words say linguistically and what the letters imply visually are disharmonious, dishonest, out of tune.”

Similar to that of typographers, cartographers need to respect visualizations of the world they craft and the implications it has on culture. A good cartographer similarly handles information in ‘intelligent, coherent, sensitive way.’ Through the misuse of scale, projection, and symbols, what the maps communicate visually can support the map-makers unconscious bias, as noted by Mark Monmonier in How to Lie with Maps. “Map users seldom, if ever, question these authorities, and they often fail to appreciate the map’s power as a tool of deliberate falsification or subtle propaganda.”

An excerpt from the book Extra Bold, which is a publication that was brought together by two graphic design students’ senior thesis at Pratt in 2018, has noted how design of maps are crucial in terms of how it represents power globally:

“My five-year-old son has an interactive map of the world that gives information about continents and countries. Most of the information concerns things like population density, land mass, and other technical matters. The exception is Europe. When this continent is selected, the recorded voice on the map exclaims, ‘Europe was the main location of several historical periods that made a huge impact on the world, like the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.” The narrative that Europe is the hub of intellectual success appears so frequently that we often don’t challenge the parallel narrative suggesting that other parts of the world lack cultural impact. Furthermore, it assumes a standard measure of success determined by colonial dominance around the world. This dominance erases other contributions over and over. An African proverb states, ‘Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.'”

Kaleena Sales, design professor at Tennessee State University, an HBCU (Historically Black College and University) in Nashville.

A link to the publication Extra Bold: https://papress.com/pages/extra-bold

Links in response to last weeks readings, specifically Why Data Sciences Needs Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein:

An interview on AIGA, Eye on Design, about the project initiated at Pratt in 2018 on gender disparity in graphic design industry & education:
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/how-can-we-bring-a-more-inclusive-history-to-design-education/

A publication bringing together the research, planning materials, design process, and physical manifestations that became the graphic design focused campaign:
https://valentina-vergara.com/archive

Protagoras of Abdera, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and rhetorical theorist, is most famous for his claim that “Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not” (DK 80B1). It can be simplified to “Man is the Measure of All Things” and interpreted that the individual human being, rather than a god or an unchanging moral law, is the ultimate source of value. As society progresses and changes, digital humanists will have to adapt to the changing culture of the political and ethical realm.

Gorgias, a Sicilian philosopher who is considered to be one of the founders of Sophism, concentrated on the status of truth about being and nature as a discursive construction, as opposed to Protagoras who asserted that man is the measure of all things. Gorgias account suggests that our grasp of reality is always mediated by discursive interpretations, which, in turn, implies that truth cannot be separated from human interests and power claims. The continuous disagreements between astronomers, politicians, and philosophers is taken to demonstrate that no logos is definitive. In relativism, since ‘truth’ is subjective the individual and culture, ‘truth’ can then be exploited by rhetoric persuasion, as long as people continue to desire the illusion of certainty, which we then continue to provide by spoken work.

Digital humanities, I personally view, is an attempt to solidify a ‘truth’ through a variety of projects, whether it be digital archives, quantitative analyses, visualizations of large image sets, or through argumentative essays. While there is still a continuous debate about the role of digital humanities, we must still be aware of how we define ‘truth’ without our own human interests and power claims interfering.

For example, in Introduction A DH That Matters, it is noted that the role of digital humanities has rapidly changed due to the rising rhetoric of racism, sexism, and xenophobia in our country. However, as noted in the Introduction in Bodies of Information, racism and sexism still exist in the Digital Humanities communities, where “forms of intellectual engagement that confront structural misogyny and racism relegated to the status of fringe concerns”. They were also aware that “as members of a panel of white women from Canada, the United States, and Australia, we were and are not subject to the full force of exclusion that our trans and women of color colleagues systematically experience.”

Since individuals are a source of value as opposed to an unchanging moral law (if we are to follow Protagoras philosophy of “Man is the Measure of All Things”), we must be aware of how we may not be the most reliable or objective source of ‘truth’. In Introduction in Bodies of Information, Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh note that they are aware that this collection “cannot be completely representative of the whole of the field”, as it “largely presents perspectives from within the privileged perspectives in academia…”. I view Digital Humanities as an ongoing pursuit of certainty by gathering and showcasing data through technological means in order to make it more accessible to people to view, as well as easy to understand. We attempt to document history so it is not forgotten or manipulated through a fragile thing like memory. However documentation of history must be presented knowing that truth can be subjective to each individual.