29 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. In addition to the text, Clarkson also included a set of tables intended to reinforce the factual nature of the evidence visualized above.

      This sort of repeats the chunk from two above.

    2. grounding criteria of that era's definition of visual display: making "previously invisible phenomena subject to direct inspection," as Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer propose, and making those phenomena "palpable and concrete."

      I wonder if the Daston and Gallison notion of 'epistemic virtues' helps here in some way.

    3. Most are naked, but several are clothed

      Oh wow zoom. I thought that would be too much to suggest above! It is too bad that all these effects get lost in mobile views.

    4. a view of the hold—and

      This zoom focusing effect here is very nice.

    5. the one having to do with the uneasy alliance between slavery and data

      This is a little more complicated than that one, isn't it? Here visualization provides the corrective to data's disembodiment?

    6. remain below

      There's got to be some way to use position:sticky to keep it this particular thing thing, rather than the second one in the lower right, if you want.

    1. We hope that visualization researchers, in turn, will come away with expanded knowledge of the history of their own field, and an appreciation for how the power of visualization—for that we do not dispute—emerges from a much broader set of cultural, scientific, and political ideas

      With the previous sentence, this reads a bit as "this project will correct bad work from visualization researchers and assure humanists that they're right about things." You can and should make clearly enunciate form, collaborative authorship, and design of the work here are form of corrective to the practices of humanities scholarship and informed by the practices of researchers and especially practitioners from the visualization fields.

      Also I don't exactly know who 'visualization researchers' are.

    2. I

      There's a shift here from first-person-plural authorship to first-person singular.

    3. As we contemplate what can be learned through data analysis and its visual display, we must also always consider the context—and very often, the humanity—that is stripped away.

      If this project is really about visualization, I think you should pare this section about data in general down a great deal: potentially to a paragraph which is explicitly about Data Feminism and uses your -- and Jessica Marie Johnson's, et al. -- experience looking at data critically to motivate a specific history of visualization imbued with those lessons.

    4. earliest versions of these ledger books still included a substantial amount of descriptive text

      Going back to Scott's Against the Grain, one of his points is that writing exists solely as an instrument of record-keeping (for the state, and merchants) for centuries before it's used for narrative.

    5. But when looking at what Mary Poovey terms the “epistemological unit” of data, as opposed to the word itself

      IMO double-entry bookkeeping is not a useful detour in the history of the table… contra 'air of objectivity' I think it's really about auditability and standards of mistrust…

    6. we will discover

      I would probably phrase the 'we will discover' as scoped just to data visualization, whereas the racism of Walker, Galton, Pearson, etc. is known (and citable) scholarship that forces us to ask why data visualization hasn't been forced to be seen in that light.

    7. that it has enabled present-day archaeologists to pinpoint the locations of these historical towns

      Needs citation

    8. Mesoamerican pictorial devices

      I'm left opening this image in a new tab to get full-res of the images -- may need to enhance the picture element.

      Also not sure about the contrast of 'mesoamerican pictorial devices' with 'European mapmaking techniques' -- European maps of this period are pretty heavy on the images (I always taught Champlaign's map from 1632 for just this) and it seems to assume that there aren't Aztec mapmaking techniques. No idea what they are. Seems to be a book about this merits citation? https://archive.org/details/mappingofnewspai0000mund/page/n5/mode/2up

    9. artist

      why "artist"? could be 'scribe', etc.

    10. colonial

      I don't know if it's worth wading into this whole thing, but if you put the emphasis on any of the three words 'settler-colonial state' you'll get a really different story. The first is kind of James Scott, the public land survey system, etc. The second is maybe the one you're going to tell; it's also more aligned with Francis Kinnahan's take on the census atlases https://www.jstor.org/stable/40068544?read-now=1 which IIRC emphasizes the resource-extractive take towards the West, not their settlability/population.

    11. gathered information from those they colonized

      I sort of want a tiny bit more here about why this map exists -- was someone looking over Shanawdithit's shoulder? Giving her the pen? Where and when did this hit an archive? (and I've absorbed the library-land condemnation of the phrase 'the archive' -- here we're really talking about the archives of settler colonial states, or something.)

    12. 22Schmidt

      I can probably just preliiminary-publish the URL on my project here if you want it… Have also seen people cite -- dear God -- my 2015 AHA paper.

    13. increasingly pervasive empiricist worldview

      I think the word 'Enlightenment' needs to appear in this paragraph. Like, the traditional story, though not maybe not explicitly enough, treats data visualization as one of the great Enlightenment inventions. And there's some historiographical mainline you can plug into about how great the enlightenment and its inventions really were.

    14. We

      Assuming you mean here 'we' the authors of this project, but there's also an implicit jockeying for authority here (and reflected in the comments) where the 'we' is history/cultural studies. Somewhere (maybe it's coming in the intro) you may need to take up arms and lay out the reasons you (singular or plural) are coming from an extremely different notion of 'scholarship' than Tufte or most IEEE-viz card-carryers.

    15. Tufte

      Yeah, I think the comments here make clear that you need to engage a little more directly with who Tufte is. Possibly deploying critical vocabulary from literary studies -- canon, etc -- I was about to say that his weird fusion of critic and tastemaker is a weird old-fashioned like Matthew Arnold thing, but then I thought maybe like Helen Vendler?

    16. death-count

      I would probably say 'casualty rate' or something here -- I know nothing about the campaign, but I'd assume that desertions outnumber deaths.

      (I've always had a sneaking suspicion that Minard's chart isn't based on solid data, either, but when I tried to go to whatever is generally thought to be his source my French wasn't good enough to tell)

    17. RandomTimeline

      Probably want the z-index higher on the buttons here than the shuffled cards?

  2. Aug 2021
  3. dhc-barnard.github.io dhc-barnard.github.io
    1. fundamentally reimagine how academic communities are embodied across time and space

      This has always been a core project of the digital humanities, and it's worth saying so here.

      Climate change should be the incentive for the Digital Humanities to shed the ugly, vestigial industrial apparatus of the academy and embrace new forms of organization.

    2. develop novel funding schemes for longer research stays

      This sounds like fellowships. Is it fellowships? If there is one thing that we don't need, it's more goddamned fellowships.

    3. companies such as Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Tencent, and Tesla

      redundant with 'concentrated nature... Just:

      In particular, given the immense power wielded by monopolistic big tech, our use of their resources should be informed by the ways corporate economic, cultural, and scientific power perpetuates the crisis.

    4. The Research We Do

      This focuses purely on the effects of new-form digital research. What about the monument to deforestation with oil-based dustcovers that conventional humanists fetishize on the walls of their offices?

    5. We are not experts in the consequences of climate change. And we are not those currently most directly impacted by the consequences of climate change

      This is kind of meek for a manifesto.

    6. on the brink of catastrophe

      We are already in a growing cluster of catastrophes, not "on the brink" of a single one.