During this semester, I attended two workshops held by the CUNY Digital Initiatives: 1) Tools for the Digital Humanities (Sep 17th) and 2) Introduction to R and R Studio (Oct 1st). I would like to share my experience of participating in the Introduction to R and R Studio workshop between the two workshops.

Actually, criminal justice research takes a much more quantitative approach, and statistical analysis of empirical data is the key process in practical research. To meet this tendency, I learned to use some statistical software programs, including Stata, SPSS, and R. But, looking back on my experience, I have rarely used R because R is a coding-based program while Stata and SPSS adopt more graphics-based interfaces. In other words, I need to input complicated commands that look like machine language when using R. In contrast, it is sufficient to click on buttons several times when utilizing Stata and SPSS.

But, things have changed. This semester, professors in other classes use R as the main statistics software, and I also became interested in data visualization. For now, I cannot turn away R anymore. I need to get familiar with R and understand this software more deeply. The Introduction to R and R Studio workshop provided me with a good opportunity.

The workshop began with a quick introduction to how to install R and R studio. Then, the instructor explained how to handle the data and showed some examples of data visualization. It seemed that R had its clear strength in data visualization compared to other statistical software programs. For example, the shapes and colors of treemaps and mosaic plots were more discernible and attractive. We could also easily customize these graphics based on our preferences. And some kinds of data visualization were that I had never seen in other software programs. I think such power of R comes from passionate user groups and various packages with nearly infinite expandability.

As a criminal justice major, my interest in data visualization still remains abstract and unclear. In other words, for now, I do not have a specific idea about how I can make a good connection between crime and data visualization using R. Bridging crime and data visualization would be a time-consuming and laboring task. It is because I need to search for more pieces of the literature and get familiar with using R. But, just knowing that R can provide compelling data visualization and that I need to have an in-depth understanding of R has made this workshop worthwhile.

Comments about Peabody’s historical visualization work and its connections to the evolution of InfoVis in the digital era

How could we reimagine our futures based on seeing important events of our past from different perspectives? That was what Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the nineteenth-century writer, editor, and educator, proposed in her historical visualization work. Peabody developed a method that consisted in translating historical events into shape and color. Developed as a pedagogical practice with her students, she intended to help them register their account of the past converting text into image. By exploring different forms of understanding about the past, they would have new ways to develop a critical view about what could be their desirable futures. 

Why does this chart impress me? In my perspective, it has a great connection with current discussions about the evolution of InfoVis (Information Visualization) and how it has opened up new forms of interpreting information through graphics. 

According to Lev Manovich (2010), InfoVis is a practice that traditionally carries on two key principles: reduction, since it uses graphical primitives such simple geometric shapes to stand in for objects and relations between them; and the use of spatial variables (position, size, shape, etc.) to represent critical differences in the data and reveal most essential patterns and relations, instead of valuing other visual dimensions such as tones, shading patterns, colors or other graphical elements. 

With digital technologies, he points to the emergence of media visualization: a new era for InfoVis based on the possibility of creating visualization without reduction. By using data objects, we can now create visualizations directly from them, not using graphical shapes to explain something visually. Consequently, the viewer is pushed to develop different forms of interpreting data through infographics. Instead of capturing information by analyzing simple graphics, media visualization turns into an aesthetic experience, as well as a prolific way to have new forms of inquiry. One example of this is the project Cinema Redux, which involved sampling a film at the rate of one frame per second and scaled each frame to 8×6 pixels.

Even though Peabody’s historical visualization work consisted in reducing information and using graphical primitives (as a typical InfoVis project), by using colors and textures as important variables to convey meaning, it pushed viewers to interpret information by identifying patterns, going beyond the linear way of naming important facts from the past as we would see in a timeline. In Peabody’s classes, that was a writing and reading exercise for her students to unlock their imagination about the future.

What kind of futures will we be able to imagine by exploring the new possibilities that the digital era opens for InfoVis? From my perspective, the answer depends on our openness and effort in developing reading skills that enable us to do it.

References

Manovich, Lev. 2010. “What is Visualization?”.

http://shapeofhistory.net/

Photo by Eric Krull on Unsplash

On September 24^th I attended HASTAC’s Digital Fridays, an online workshop series hosted by HASTAC scholars. This Digital Friday workshop was on How to be a humanist in tech. I got to hear from four panelists discuss their experience as humanities PhDs transitioned into tech; this included possible tech jobs to apply to, how to frame your digital humanities experience in your resume, cover letter, and in interviews, as well as how digital humanities are used in their day to day at work.  

Prior to this workshop, I didn’t put much thought into the type of tech positions available in this role. I mainly focused on how my previous experience could connect to DH. There were a couple of talking points that caught my eye. For starters like me, most, if not all, the panelists had an educational work background. Second, as someone that didn’t think about possible tech positions, I was presently surprised to know there are plenty of positions that welcome those with little to no programming experience. 

 However, there was one discussion that intrigued me the most, it was in reference to how to use our humanities background. In the panel it was said, for humanists, it’s often easier for them to find a solution to a problem. Due to the projects or thesis worked, humanists know how to breakdown an issue and determine the cause. I was stunned to hear this at first, because I was strictly thinking literally, how can it be if the engineers have the technical background. However, I then remember something that my husband (software engineer) often tells me: I think of worst-case scenarios, because as an engineer you learn to think ahead on possible problems that may occur so you can fix them. While they may have thought of the problem, like was said in the panel, it doesn’t mean they found the root cause. 

I enjoyed this workshop because I witnessed another side of digital humanities. Like me, many of the audience members are new to programming, so it was refreshing to hear that there are positions out there with no programming experience required for those interested in the tech field. Lastly, while we all apply our prior experiences to what we currently work on, I enjoyed connecting to those that have a similar background as me, it allowed me to view possible future opportunities. 

In many discourses and practices, maps seem to play the role of transparent bearers of objective truth. They seem to present to us a universal view of different levels of the cosmological landscape that allow us to do different things within this cosmos. How to Lie With Maps complicates this by showing us how maps are always already distortions of the landscapes they attempt to represent, and there is an intimate and direct relationship between the way a map gets created (in/as distortion) and what it is to be used for. As Mark Monmonier shows, the cartographic paradox is such that “to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies” (Monmonier, 1). At the level of projection, the map must distort three dimensional shape, size, angle, and direction in order to plot these dimensions on a flat surface. Maps must use necessarily inadequate symbols. The smaller the scale of the map is, the more details will have to be left out in order to make relevant details legible. Because of these reasons, maps are always “white lies”, but this structural gap leaves an opening for them to become “real lies” through “ignorance, greed, ideological blindness, or malice” (Monmonier, 2).

It is through this structural opening in mapmaking that maps have been historically enmeshed with sovereignty and colonialism. In the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, our current post-Enlightenment framework for sovereignty was established: “The traditional philosophy of sovereignty…poses that national governments hold supreme authority over their internal affairs and that other states should not intervene under exception of threat or obligation of alliance” and that this authority is “absolute, territorially confined, and vertically rooted in the apparatus of the state” (Bonilla and Hantel). In Visualizing Sovereignty, Yarimar Bonilla and Max Hantel point to the fact that global maps, as they traditionally depict nation-states, existed before this treaty and were a part of the shaping of insular sovereignty that centralizes power in the state apparatus. The symbolization of strictly drawn borders and the naming of territories lent themselves to an assemblage of power which was the condition of possibility for modern ideas and practices of sovereignty. Whether unconscious or conscious, malicious or not, these maps helped make these ideas possible and laid the grounds for colonialism. 

What Bonilla and Hantel also show us is that these conceptions of sovereignty begin to break down once we consider a region like the Caribbean. The societies of the Caribbean are depicted in the same way as the independent self-contained nation-states of the Global North, but according to Bonilla and Hantel, power is not so neatly organized there: “the majority of societies in the Caribbean are not independent nation-states but rather protectorates, territories, departments, and commonwealths…the Caribbean also holds a large number of nonsovereign enclaves: military bases, privately owned islands, semiautonomous tourist resorts, free-trade zones, tax havens, wildlife preserves, satellite launching stations, detention centers, penal colonies, floating data centers, and other spaces of suspended, subcontracted, usurped, or imposed foreign jurisdiction” (Bonilla and Hantel). By looking at a normal map of the area, one would never perceive the supranational forces that traverse it at many levels. It is entangled in a global politics that upsets anything resembling the Westphalian conception of insular self-governing. In addition to having borders which are actually porous and interconnected, these societies and their borders have histories that could never be captured in a static two-dimensional map. This is where the benefit of spatiotemporal technology comes into play: “Through the use of time lapse maps, scholars are able to convey shifts and changes over time, unsettling our views of contemporary borders and political relationships”. They are thus able to show how, in the supposedly “postcolonial” era, outside influences continue to force themselves upon the Caribbean. They also navigate a lot of the choices that Monmonier points out as going into mapmaking in order to tell a story. They utilize color to demarcate what foreign powers play a role in these societies, they use time-lapse to show at what point in the timeline these powers exert their influence; they edit the scale to represent each society as the same size, so as to not introduce biases about importance; and they do not choose one projection to create the illusion of transparency and objectivity, but instead choose to organize each society in a map-as-infographic.

What is truly transformative about this project is the way its engagement with ideas and histories of sovereignty make us question sovereignty, not just in the context of the postcolonial Caribbean, but as such. As Bonilla and Hantel write, “claims to sovereignty have always been fractured, layered, negotiated, and contested” (Bonilla and Hantel). I would argue this is even truer in the context of the Anthropocene, where the planet has been thoroughly globalized and the sovereignty of nation-states has been liquidated by hyperindustrial capitalism. The behavior of political and citizen actors has been regulated and programmed by what Antoinette Rouvroy calls algorithmic governmentality. I do not agree with their prescription for what they call a nonsovereign archipelago. Instead of abandoning the concept of sovereignty altogether, I believe this project provides us with the opportunity to deconstruct and reconstruct sovereignty according to values such as international democracy/contribution, knowledge, and care for the other. However, their concept of prophetic cartography can give us new ways of looking at what it means to be part of a global community in a context wherein there is so much backlash against “globalism” and in the face of imminent climate crises that will uproot countless innocent people. Rooted in an international sovereignty of hospitality, such mapmaking potentials could intervene directly in such crises and be tools in local political struggle, as was shown in The Puerto Rico Mapathon for Hurricane Relief conducted by the Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities at Columbia University. It is shifts in the technical system of humanity such as these that needs to be seized to resist what Derrida has called the tendency toward the Worst, which we see manifested on a daily basis.

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

Maps are an excellent tool for providing a visual and intuitive way to know the current phenomena and distributions. Monmonier (1996) argued that scale, projection, and symbolization were used to make maps more accurate and informative. But, he also asserted that these techniques could be potential sources of distortion due to the improper use of such techniques and their intrinsic limitations. For example, on a map using the Mercator projection, Greenland appears to be as large as South America, but in reality, it is only one-eighth the size of South America. Thus, a good map for Monmonier would be a precise map that reflects the reality as much as possible so that a map will not lead the reader to erroneous conclusions.

However, Bonilla & Hantel (2016) and Sen (2017) told different stories. According to them, a map that accurately shows the current state is the product of Western-centrism or colonialism. First, Bonilla & Hantel emphasized the historical context. To them, territories on a map separated by the standard of sovereign states merely reflected the concept of sovereignty formed in Westphalia. What is important to them is the historical process of forming the Caribbean countries as they are today. Next, Sen argued that platforms like Google Maps revealed a pervasive digital divide in the world. For example, most American villages are represented to the extent that we can see minor trails in the countrysides, while some towns in India appear blurry no matter how they are zoomed in. According to Sen, this is the symbol of inequality and colonialism. Therefore, if a map accurately reflects only the current state and does not show the historical process and values that locate under the present phenomenon, people can take a specific phenomenon for granted. This tendency will exacerbate distortions and inequality in the world.

Which approach is more appropriate? I think the answer also depends on the context and academic tendency. For example, if I am currently mapping violent crime rates by region, I will have to combine different mapping techniques and create an accurate map not to mislead readers. However, if someone else is studying Korean-American immigration and community formation, simply mapping the current distribution of Korean Americans on a map would never be sufficient. Like Bonilla & Hantel’s approach, rather than pursuing map accuracy, a mapping that can represent both historical origins and temporal/spatial aspects of migration would be more appropriate. In other words, thoughts about whether mapping can contribute to the goals pursued by different disciplines may provide insight into what is a more appropriate mapping.

References

Monmonier, Mark. (1996). How to Lie with Maps. 2nd ed. The University of Chicago Press.

Bonilla, Yarimar, and Max Hantel. (2016). “Visualizing Sovereignty” Sx Archipelagos, no. 1 (May).

Sen, Mayukh. (2017). “Dividing Lines. Mapping platforms like Google Earth have the legacies of colonialism programmed into them“Platforms like Google Earth Have the Legacies of Colonialism Programmed into Them.” Real Life, March 27, 2017.

Applications of digital mapping, with opportunities for animation, interactive engagement, and direct connections to layers of source material often in historical context, demonstrate benefits and values of digital humanities research. Many of these research efforts provide direct access to information that only a short while ago would have taken years for a single researcher to collect. The possibility of connecting directly relevant source information to a map suggests a breaking through of traditionally assumed boundaries (two-dimensional flat maps, for example).  With the shedding of such customary constraints, possibilities arise for examining interactions among materials as well as gaining access to a wealth of relevant information. What at first glance might appear to be a simple map is suddenly a door that will provide access to collected knowledge on a specific subject.  

In our reading, I was particularly struck by how powerfully the concept of “time” became an actor in some of the interactive mapping.  In “Visualizing Sovereignty,” Bonilla and Hantel (2016) include a time-lapse animation by Claudio Saunt (2014) that illustrates how the USA seized land from Indians from 1776 onwards. The animation takes a minute and a half as it crawls, like a silent bulldozing apparatus, from east to west across the land mass, leaving in its wake a few areas indicated as reservations. In 90 seconds, prior life on the land is obliterated. Nothing remains but the USA. Within this astonishing display, there are connections provided to every treaty and every executive order ever signed concerning the settlement of the tribal lands. It succeeds both a visual blast and an intricately archived historical document.  

In contrast, Vincent Brown’s 2012 animated map history of the 1760-61 slave revolt provides an opportunity to perceive of the event in slow motion instead of swallowing it as a chunk of history. Leaf after leaf of the map pages illustrate the activities and routes of the rebels, the local militias, the maroons, and the British military by date and area. A running commentary from witnesses and other historical sources appears in a column on the left. Brown acknowledges that some information is simply impossible to obtain and must be left to conjecture. Nevertheless, through his depiction, the passage of time becomes palpable. His map includes information on the days of greatest and least activity, parts of the island that were engaged and when, numbers of lives reported lost, rebels imprisoned and tortured, landowners and overseers murdered, naval ships moving around the perimeter of Jamaica.  I am not aware that I have previously become engaged with “time” as part of an overall perception or response to a mapping experience. Perhaps this is a dimension that is particularly applicable to interactivity and animation experiences in the digital humanities area.   

 Brown, Vincent. 2012. Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative, http://revolt.axismaps.com.

Bonilla, Yarimar, and Max Hantel. 2016. “Visualizing Sovereignty” Sx Archipelagos, no. 1 (May).

 Saunt, Claudio. 2014. Invasion of America: How the United States Took Over an Eighth of the World, video, 1:27, published 2 June 2014 by History.org, http://youtu.be/pJxrTzfG2bo. For an interactive map, see http://invasionofamerica.ehistory.org.