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!

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Felicity Howlett

The authors portray “excellence” as “the gold standard of the University world.” They suggest that the overwhelming, overweening focus on the term (whether applied to academicians, to output, to guiding principles, institutions, or networks) has turned it into a “pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship” (1). How did this come to be? A trope that I remember from graduate studies and following is the threat/command “Publish or Perish.” At least “excellence” seems to suggest a positive direction. Abused now, the word may have begun its life in academic circles as an intentionally positive and uplifting principle. I have not attempted to study how the historical academic use of the word has changed or how it has morphed into having negative connotations implying a specific path to accomplishment.

While I have no argument with the authors’ argument nor with their reasons for making it, I found the article very difficult to digest. Part of the reason was the different voices that appeared within the discussion. These ranged from the first and only footnote on page 1, a glib/sarcastic/cute account of how authors’ names had been ordered in the title information, to page 21, and the suggestion that, as it pertains to critics of disciplinary expansion, “such criticism is always more Canutian than effective.” Having skirted through a reference to Hippocrates in the preceding paragraph, I got stopped short by Canute and had to go to Google  (See  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide). All this creates some wobbly stones along the path of a discussion of (mis)applications of the word excellence.

Most of the first seventeen pages comprise a complaint about the use and abuse of the term in academic settings. Only at the halfway point are we are told that the problem is not with the word “excellence,” but with its improper application:   . . .”we diagnose the problem not as the pursuit of quality per se, but as the concentration of attention (and resources) on the intense competition to make it into the top few percent—it is not ‘excellence’ or its pursuit that is the problem; it is the concentration only on only the excellent ” (18).

If that had been clarified on page one, a good amount of paper might have been saved. Later, concern focuses on how the field of Digital Humanities is affected by (the oppressiveness of) the wholesale embrace of “excellence.” Up to this point, the concerns seemed more appropriately focused on the conservative tendencies of the academy in general (and their negative effect on many areas).

Near the conclusion, the authors suggest that a rhetoric built around ‘soundness’ offers opportunities: “Soundness appears to be a plausible basis on which to build a new narrative, or rather to combine existing threads into a more consistent rhetorical framework” (29). Despite all the good reasons offered, it is surprising that, after all they have been through, the authors would suggest an alternative, substitute word for “excellence.” “Excellence” has been abused, misinterpreted, and forced into false representations. Once, it must have been a worthy word—its antonym is inferiority or mediocrity. How can we possibly imagine that the same fate would not befall the word “soundness?”

Throughout the article, I felt that the authors needed to liberate themselves from the conventional academic constraints they were arguing against—that their arguments were hampered by the same context that caused their objections. Substituting “substance” for “excellence” does not offer an alternative solution. It just offers an alternative noun. Perhaps the way the word “excellence” is scattered throughout academic life is more a symptom than a cause.

“Excellence” should not be used as a term used to protect older areas of the academy from its upstarts. Yet it seems that there will always be greater weight given to most established areas than to the new. What is exciting is how quickly newer areas gain representation and become part of the foundation! We bear witness to this in the increasing role of the field of Digital Humanities and its contributions.

 Moore, Samuel; Neylon, Cameron; Eve, Martin Paul; O’Donnell, Daniel; Pattinson, Damian (2016): Excellence R Us: University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence. figshare. Journal contribution.  https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3413821.v1

A couple of thoughts in retrospect about my experience with the visualization and/or text mining praxis assignment.

1) As I searched for ways to mine text for the terms “important” and “importantly” used in an adverbial context with and without modifiers such as “more” and “most,” my first success was at the New York Public Library’s digital newspaper archives. However, most of the archives I discovered did not extend into the 21^st century, and many were unique to a specific newspaper. The Free Google Newspaper Archives presented similar obstacles. I was looking for a fat collection of diverse USA and English newspapers or literary texts that would demonstrate how words were used over a specific period, in this case, 1969-2021. Searching for a literature dataset, I soon understood that The Project Gutenberg Collection, which has been an invaluable collection for so much research, was not appropriate for this project given its concentration of pre-21^st century literature. I found the Google Ngram Viewer that mined language up to 2012, and soon after that, the Google update, extending to 2109. Apart from the Google collection, I found no supply that permitted a similar search for the data for my specific dates. (Although I looked at various public information sites, the use of language in these sites did not seem to be representative of traditional, habitual language use.)  Shortly after submitting my assignment, I met with Filippa Cordero to ask her, among other things, why it had been so difficult to locate an appropriate body of text. She explained that locating a data site (or creating one) can be among the more challenging aspects of the text mining experience.

 2) I used Ngram to visualize text. It seemed too easy. Voyant had been recommended. When I cruised the site, it seemed that the visualizations were more complicated than the linear graph I had made However, once I took my time going through Voyant, I saw that the “Trends” illustration in the visualization examples exactly matched what I was achieving through Ngram. The major obstacle was that I could not find a data site that would provide me with the collected information to reproduce from Voyant what I could achieve through Ngram (with its store of Google material).

3) I haven’t had any luck seeking a data source for my feelings about this experience, but I did find a description in the first few seconds of an old tune: “It’s Easy When You Know How.” Clive Burke, 1948.

Ryan Cordell’s account, “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities,” is an exceptionally refreshing perspective on how digital technology can be integrated into humanities courses in an undergraduate academic setting. His practical approach to bringing technological applications to students, interlacing innovation and historical context, emerged after his initial, general proposal for a Digital Humanities (DH) course failed to gain acceptance. Rethinking his agenda, he peeled away the cloudy, theoretical layers enclosing his topic—definitions of the field, its role in academic protocol, its responsibilities—and focused on incorporating applications from some core areas into academic inquiry. By relinquishing the responsibility to “cover the field,” he succeeded in placing materials and methods together on the table for a more hands-on approach. Along the way, his course titles have shifted from, for example, “Doing Digital Humanities” to “Texts, Maps, Networks: Digital Literary Studies.” Clarity comes from demonstration and engagement in meaningful digital skills and innovations.

Near the end of his discussion, Cordell considers a prediction that “digital humanities” may not be around at some future point. His response: “If it falls away because DH methodologies have become widely accepted as possible ways (among many) to study literature, history, and other humanities subjects, this seems to me a fine outcome.” That would seem to be a defining goal for the field—to become so integrated into the body specific that there would not have to be a distinction. Implementation of digital technologies, increased visualizations, sonic exploration, the ability to measure and think beyond the binary, the unearthing of material that has upended old ways of looking at things—all of these and more should be part of the working tools for scholarship in the humanities. As he points out, such an integration has not yet taken place.

The immensity of this pool of information—of data, interests, goals, implicit possibility, and the burgeoning applications (and their ever-expanding potential)—is demonstrated by the website, “Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities.” It is fed by so many rivulets that even keyword definitions are difficult to contain. In the abundance of possible interpretations, the relative youth of DH is particularly notable, and that seems to correspond with the promise that the field holds. As digital technologies are instrumental in unlocking previously hidden, or overlooked caches of historical information, there is immediacy and intensity in making these connections. Likewise, relatively younger, evolving areas (disability, feminism, sex, gender, marginalization of indigenous communities, to name a few), are replete with interested parties lobbying for space and acknowledgment. All this, while DH and its related areas are evolving so quickly that new attempts at self-definition appear every few years.

Within the above website, for example, the first keyword is Access. Perhaps I anticipated a discussion of how to make DH topics accessible to students. Rather, the first article opens with the report that 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability and how lack of digital access presents a significant barrier (Williams, Access: Curatorial Statement). Surely more than 15% of the world’s population lacks access to digital materials before the issue of disability even presents itself! This point is not to create an argument but simply to emphasize the range of issues that are brought into the forum for discussion and how difficult it is to cover them all while retaining a sense of focus and structure. In the following article, “Suggested Practices for Syllabus Accessibility,” Tara Wood and Shannon Madden encourage instructors to create their own (more personal) statements to students about accessibility. Examples are provided, including the idea of personalization such as “Your success in this class is important to me.” Such a remark may take place with sincerity in a classroom, but in this context, it seems an accommodation to a prevailing political academic atmosphere that goes beyond what might reasonably be included within the term “access” in a DH syllabus. In contrast, a “Wordpress Accessibility Plugin” also appears in this keynote collection as does “An Accessibility Audit Assignment,” a project asking students to assess the accessibility of given campus spaces.

With time, some topics that represent particularly sensitive issues, may fade from these areas, not because they should be forgotten but because they will become foundational in more general academic considerations rather than paperclipped into the DH field. And as the field develops and matures, it will take on a more definable shape. For the moment, I have a lot of sympathy for Ryan Cordell’s efforts to hone into methods of working with his students in ways that helped them connect and integrate the past, the present and the future!

References:

Cordell, Ryan. 2016. “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press.

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments. A peer-reviewed, scholarly collection of pedagogical artifacts. Website edited by Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers.

 “Some decades ago, William Safire wrote about the then current acceptable usage of the words, “more important” and “more importantly.” Thanks to search engines, I located the article in the April 25, 1982 edition of the New York Times Magazine without getting out of my chair (https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/25/magazine/on-language.html ).

In 1982, I was repelled by Safire’s accommodating attitude to those who would connect the words “more” and “importantly”.  How could the Prince of Grammar adopt such an unaesthetic, auditorily painful position. My response was not unique. Safire was aware that his (somewhat hesitant) acceptance of the usage would inspire an adverse reaction in some readers, and his discussion was both generous and humorous. Since that article, “importantly,” has gained prominence at the beginning of a phrase. As can be seen in the Ngram charts below, the “ly” camp has overrun the less gaudy “More important.” My distaste is more visceral than intellectual, and it has remained with me.

For this visualization assignment, I attempted to look at how the words “important,” “importantly,” “more important,” and “more importantly” appear over time in print.  

I used Google’s Ngram Viewer to seek the single words and bigrams (two-word sequences) as listed above (but without quotation marks). I thought I would get more traction if I specified their function as adverbs (This can be done by pinning “_ADV” to a term).  That, however, did not produce meaningful results. Dropping “important” from the competition–it really functions as an adjective–helped clear up the purpose of the search. The default for the Ngram Viewer is a distinction between upper and lower case letters. I searched first without distinguishing cases and then again with the default. I capitalized all of the first words, hoping that this approach would cause the search engine to focus on the beginnings of sentences. It seemed to improve the quality of the search somewhat, but I could not find a way to limit the search to this approach. The charts below show the word “Start” preceding the bigrams. This application permits the search engine to look for modifying words that are closely related to the main term, for example, to count “Most importantly” as well “More importantly.”

The charts below represent the same search in English language materials spanning different time sequences, from 1969-2019 and from 1999-2019. They illustrate the consistency of the trend and show that when used as an adverb, alone or with a modifier, ‘importantly’ overtook ‘important’ around 2010.

As I was looking at possible approaches to this topic, I found further confirmation of the trend and discussion of usage. For example, dictionary.com, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary 2021, includes the following note:

The Merriam-Webster online site devotes an article to the subject: “We Know You’re Concerned about ‘Important” and ‘Importantly.'” Nineteenth century examples are provided for both ‘More important,’ and ‘More importantly.’ https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/we-know-youre-concerned-about-important-and-importantly To my surprise, the graph depicting usage trends from 1800 was produced by the Google Ngram Viewer.

Before I came upon the Merriam-Webster graph, I thought I would have to trash the Ngram Viewer and start from scratch. The more I worked with it, the more I felt an ambiguity about how the search decisions were made and what I could reasonably conclude from the results. For example, was I double dipping by asking the search engine to find both the single word ‘important’ and its appearance with a modifier? I did not see a way to control for that. Nor did I understand what it might or might not mean for the search to take place in a massive collection of undifferentiated material. Google describes the Ngram Viewer’s corpus as “the scanned books available in Google Books.” Would I have obtained a sharper depiction if I had searched only newspaper articles or research articles? How would such selections affect an interpretation, and for that matter, what can be interpreted from this information? If I could tighten the search either by using a program that offered more choices or by developing enough skill so that I could tweak the Ngram search, what possible differences might be obtained? By now, I’m about saturated with this topic. I going to believe that Merriam-Webster, by example, gave me permission to use the Ngram Viewer as a visualizer. My sense of a historic trend corresponded to the trends found by the Ngram Viewer, and articles from dictionary sources confirm the feelings and the findings! Questions about the corpus, how searches are conducted, and what kinds of conclusions may be drawn from the results will continue to be an ever-present and fascinating part of this work.

Workshop Summary, Felicity Howlett

I attended the video storytelling workshop, part of the Carnegie Educational Technology Fellows series, led by Mike Mena on Monday, Oct. 25. Mike is a Ph.D. candidate at CUNY in Linguistic Anthropology with a particular interest in institutions of higher education, racialization, and bilingualism/multilingualism. An experienced video producer with many YouTube videos available online, he worked for years as a high school teacher. This background, in combination with extensive research and an intense interest in looking beneath surface glitter and behind generally accepted stereotypes, makes for a dramatic experience. He has a website: “The Social Life of Language: Theorizing Language/Critical Race Theory,” and many clips on YouTube. He explained that although his audience is composed mainly of undergraduate and graduate students, his compositional focus is on high school students, and he summons his high school teacher “persona” for his YouTube presentations.

During the hour, Mike provided a tremendous amount of information through explanation and illustration, including his belief that narration about an event is less effective than demonstrating a conflict from a character’s point of view. He discussed using entertainment to foster engagement, and he identified two critical elements as character development and conflict. The question for this workshop: “How do you take a social theory and turn it into a story?” His answer was entertaining, engaging, carefully structured, enlightening, and fascinating!

The topic today was “Interest Convergence Theory,” an aspect of Critical Race Theory developed by Derrick Bell. It speaks to the potential success of black interests as long as those interests converge or are mutually beneficial to the interests of powerful (white) interests. To illustrate the theory, he chose the characters of Derrick Bell and Abraham Lincoln.  Before moving into an argument, and to establish the legitimacy of his video, Mike offered three references:  1) “Brown vs. the Board of Education,” 2) Silent Convenants, a book by Bell about the court case, and 3) the Derrick Bell Reader (biographical).  He chose incidents from Derrick Bell’s life that would develop Bell as a character rather than provide a list of chronological achievements. (For example, Bell was hired to work for the government in the Civil Rights Division, but when he refused to resign from the NAACP, his desk was moved into a hallway. Later, having become the first tenured black professor at Harvard, he resigned to protest Harvard’s hiring practices, specifically until such time as a black woman was hired.) 

To illustrate Lincoln, Mike chose “The Emancipation Proclamation,” lesser-known quotes and put them into the context of the Civil War. When Interest Convergence Theory is applied to the Emancipation Proclamation, its language demonstrates that Lincoln’s priority was to maintain the nation. When freeing the slaves served that purpose, it served both black and white interests. Accordingly, emancipation was a strategic tactical matter, and, later, the 15^th Amendment may be seen in a similar context.

When selecting details that might best serve a successful story, Mike offered three requirements: Details must 1) develop the character(s) and the story; 2) serve the purpose of the video essay itself (to teach); 3) prioritize details that are more interesting than factual (i.e., memorable events rather than a list of dates).  

This was an invaluable introduction for me to the idea of story-telling online. It provided an overview of intention, a working structure in which to design a story, positive and negative approaches, maintained a rhythm between the speaker and the story line, photographs, and historic materials. The story was a powerful illustration of Interest Convergence Theory, powerfully delivered.

Please tap URL to open link to Part 2

bhttps://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5de76cf7c1484fc3a06d357e9b723dea

Please tap URL to Open Part 1 of this post.

fhttps://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/71c8feccdf9b43368de54ee0ec4f1930

Caitlin has provided a fine review of the information covered and the specific exercises we attempted during the session.  I would just like to add a few notes and observations to her thorough summary. 

Chelsea Lane had prepared her material thoughtfully and well. Of the three workshops I’ve attended to date, her delivery was the most successful:  well-paced, lively, with clear enunciation, poise, and a friendly presence. That was a blessing.  There was only a small glitch in her volume for the first few minutes of the session.  Once noticed, it was easily corrected.  There were some ups and downs in volume during the session, but there almost had to be, as different microphones were applied, the speaker was at varying distances from the mike, etc.  All in all, she handled the challenges of delivering and demonstrating audio equipment on Zoom exceptionally well.  I was surprised at how effectively she was able to demonstrate changes in audio quality as well. She sent out a sheet at the conclusion of the session that mentioned sites she had recommended during her talk. I found that especially valuable as I had scrambled to try to catch the references as they were made.

Learning about how Audacity can capture the residue (low level white noise, I think) of an ambiance was fascinating.  Once it is trained to pick up the “residue” when there is otherwise silence, it can remember what it is looking for, discriminate that unintended sound in a recording and remove it. 

To demonstrate splicing, Chelsea performed the same phrase sequences two times, creating a glitch in the first phrase.   Then she cut the error out of her first recording and spliced in the alternate take to show how an error on a live recording could be corrected. She did this pretty much by eye-balling the sound waves and matching them. That was amazing. I expected that such a procedure would require something like nanometer measurements!   

Meeting up and making friends with Audacity is not exactly simple, although Chelsea certainly presented the software, so that it seemed accessible. In advance of the workshop, she sent us sites for downloading the program and several examples that we would use during the session.  Without wanting to create additional work, it might be helpful to send out an outline of topics to be included in the discussion as well. Sometimes when many new concepts are introduced at once, it is hard to take them all in.   

The following is slightly off topic, but it’s a problem that others may have noticed:

During these workshops, we are often asked to fill out a survey monitored by Eventbrite at the end of the session. For our session, the form we were asked to fill out did not include the name of the workshop. I attempted to send a reply back in my email to ask what name we should fill in, but Eventbrite does not accept email replies.  It only accepts filled-out forms. No other information was provided. I finally looked in the GCDI listing and found Chelsea and sent her a note.  She had not known of that omission, and she immediately re-sent the corrected form to attendees. As I filled out the form, I skipped over another question that I found impossible to answer properly.  At the end of the form, I was not allowed to submit it because I had left a response blank.  That was it for me. I hope that this kind of survey might be made a little more user friendly.  I do not believe that forms should insist on specific responses or refuse to accept any that have an omission. This is a problem that people in DHUM may find of interest as it is a direct example of the need to reach a balance between the efficiency of automation and the human element involved.  

Workshop  Blog  – Felicity Howlett

I attended the Introduction to Archival Research workshop on Wednesday, October 13 at 3 p.m. Beth Posner, Head of Library Resource Sharing, summarized the breadth and depth of current activity in digitizing archival resources, techniques and protocols involved, the larger collections of archival materials, and aids not only to reaching certain collections but also in understanding how one might best sort through them.  The examples she offered were extremely helpful.  By searching with salient keywords and subcategories, she could reduce a response of several hundred thousand items, to several thousand, then to several hundred, and finally a few dozen.

Despite my reasonable familiarity with OneSearch and the World Cat, she provided examples for use that I had never thought about, including some that were staring right back from the topics page: “Dissertations at CUNY and Beyond,” for example, in OneSearch. While I have happily come across useful dissertations online, I was oblivious to the availability of this option on OneSearch as well as what it could mean in terms of archival research. As she pointed out, it is very possible that someone doing doctoral research on a specific topic may have gained access to or unearthed archival material that is not yet in circulation. Looking through bibliographies of such research may provide valuable leads to important material. In addition to the “Dissertations at CUNY and Beyond” label, the same tab provides opportunities to explore other dissertation collections. 

She discussed the power of the WorldCat collection and also a program specific to archived materials called Archivegrid.  That collection lists 7,000,000 records from 1400 institutional archives.  Ninety percent of the records are from the WorldCat, and ten percent have been obtained using Finding Aids. 

In the Library of Congress categories under Archives, you can see how many collections are in which category.

Finding Aids, fairly standard among collections, include:

            Collection Overview; Biographical/histories; Scope and Arrangement;             Administrative Info ; Key Terms; Using the Collection.

Subheadings/electronic terms are hyperlinked. To discover collections that do not have Finding Aids, you need to search at the Repository level.

She talked some about the New York Public Library (NYPL) Archives and Manuscripts Collection, including a Guide to locating MS and Archives, and a helpful article, Getting Started with Archives.  She spoke of the value of browsing the lists of collections, simply to become accustomed to how they appear, and then to learn how to search across collections, and the value of using Date Filters as well as Limit by Division.

In addition, she reminded us to search using the library’s regular catalog collection as well.  For example, one might find a trove of unarchived microfilmed materials. And most important, she directed us to bring questions and issues directly to the library staff.

With regard to online archival materials, she pointed out that there is a distinction between analog and digital.  She suggests that at this point, items that can be found online are probably just the tip of the iceberg. She discussed the DPLA (Digital Public Library of America) which includes specialized areas such as a Native Northeast Portal, a digital Transgender Archive, and a hub called Biodiversity Heritage Library where three of the most outstanding collections are contained in the NYPL, the Library of Congress, and Tulane University.

In the past couple of years, I have installed Zotero and started to use it as a research tool, but I have much more to learn about it. The incredible augmentation of available and accessible material through digital processes still leaves me in awe at how we can now search, connect to, and obtain information.

Just this past week, as I was wrapping up a search for photographs of Paris in the 1920s, I came upon the news that a collection of museums in Paris has recently combined resources to make approximately 62, 500 of their photographs free and accessible to the public. I scrambled to sign up to visit such a resource.  On my first try, I landed in the area to purchase admission tickets for museum visits. On my next attempts, I arrived at apologetic notes about Covid restrictions and then a denial of the validity of my email address. So I understand there are still some flaws in my basic skill set, but it certainly was a thrill to learn that such a collection is going to be online and shared! Sooner or later, I’ll visit it!!