40 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2019
    1. )LJXUHRXWZKDWVWRU\\RXZDQWWRWHOODQGGHVLJQDFFRUGLQJO\

      Just in general, I didn't have a lot of annotations here because a lot of this is very simple, straightforward design advice. It is presented very well, in casual but informative language, but most of these ideas were not new to me as someone who's studied statistics and art.

    2. 7KHFRORUOHJHQGDOVRVHUYHVGRXEOHWLPHDVDKLVWRJUDPVKRZLQJWKHGLVWULEXWLRQRIXVDJHE\QXPEHURIXVHUV

      Nice! I love the double-purpose of the legend. It's very clever and space-conscious.

    3. 7KHTXLFNDQGHDV\WKLQJWRGRZRXOGKDYHEHHQWROHW\RXUVRIWZDUHGHFLGHZKDWUDQJHWRXVHIRUHDFKKLVWRJUDP+RZHYHUHDFKKLVWRJUDPZDVPDGHRQWKHVDPHUDQJHHYHQWKRXJKWKHUHZHUHQRFRXQWULHVZKRKDG,QWHUQHWVXEVFULEHUVRUEURDGEDQGXVHUVSHULQKDELWDQWV7KLVHQDEOHV\RXWRHDVLO\FRPSDUHWKHGLVWULEXWLRQVEHWZHHQWKHJURXSV

      Ironically, what is being praised here would have had me losing marks in my statistics class. I guess it really depends on the subject, as well as the difference in scale. Because while 1 to 100 is very doable here, if you have data that can range from 1 to 10,000.... things get harder. I do appreciate this though. It is easier to compare.

    4. :KHQLW¶VDOOVDLGDQGGRQHKHUH¶VZKDW\RXQHHGWRNQRZ$SSURDFKYLVXDOL]DWLRQDVLI\RXZHUHWHOOLQJDVWRU\:KDWNLQGRIVWRU\DUH\RXWU\LQJWRWHOO",VLWDUHSRUWRULVLWDQRYHO"'R\RXZDQWWRFRQYLQFHSHRSOHWKDWDFWLRQLVQHFHVVDU\"

      This marriage of data and art - and by extension, STEM fields and arts/humanities fields - is everything I want to see in academia. How much more engaging, and therefore effective, would academia be if people really presented their work? Would chemistry still put me to sleep? I don't think so.

    5. 7KHUHDUHORWVRIRWKHUH[DPSOHVVXFKDV*RODQ/HYLQ¶V7KH'XPSVWHUZKLFKH[SORUHVEORJHQWULHVWKDWPHQWLRQEUHDNLQJXSZLWKDVLJQLILFDQWRWKHU.LP$VHQGRUI¶V6XPHGLFLQDZKLFKWHOOVDILFWLRQDOVWRU\RIDPDQUXQQLQJIURPDFRUUXSWRUJDQL]DWLRQZLWKQRWZRUGVEXWJUDSKVDQGFKDUWVRU$QGUHDV1LFRODV)LVFKHU¶VSK\VLFDOVFXOSWXUHVWKDWVKRZHFRQRPLFGRZQWXUQLQWKH8QLWHG6WDWHV

      I had NO IDEA this was a media of art that could be explored! I don't feel like I'm nearly creative enough to come up with an idea, but I would love to do a project like this in the future!

    6. 7KHEDVHRIWKHJUDSKLFLVVLPSO\DOLQHFKDUW+RZHYHUGHVLJQHOHPHQWVKHOSWHOOWKHVWRU\EHWWHU/DEHOLQJDQGSRLQWHUVSURYLGHFRQWH[WDQGKHOS\RXVHHZK\WKHGDWDLVLQWHUHVWLQJDQGOLQHZLGWKDQGFRORUGLUHFW\RXUH\HVWRZKDW¶VLPSRUWDQW

      The best part of this graphic is the emphasis on men and women - someone untrained in statistics or graphs may have trouble seeing how "women live longer" because the lines do eventually merge - the emphasis shows where in the graph they should be looking to fully understand it.

    7. 7KHLQWHUDFWLYHSLHFHVFUDSHVVHQWHQFHVDQGSKUDVHVIURPSHUVRQDOSXEOLFEORJVDQGWKHQYLVXDOL]HVWKHPDVDER[RIIORDWLQJEXEEOHV(DFKEXEEOHUHSUHVHQWVDQHPRWLRQDQGLVFRORUFRGHGDFFRUGLQJO\$VDZKROHLWLVOLNHLQGLYLGXDOVIORDWLQJWKURXJKVSDFHEXWZDWFKDOLWWOHORQJHUDQG\RXVHHEXEEOHVVWDUWWRFOXVWHU$SSO\VRUWVDQGFDWHJRUL]DWLRQWKURXJKWKHLQWHUIDFHWRVHHKRZWKHVHVHHPLQJO\UDQGRPYLJQHWWHVFRQQHFW&OLFNDQLQGLYLGXDOEXEEOHWRVHHDVLQJOHVWRU\,W¶VSRHWLFDQGUHYHDOLQJDWWKHVDPHWLPH

      This is so incredibly cool and is such a god study into the human experience of feeling like you're the only one experiencing something, while it is statistically likely that someone else is going through the exact same thing. Unrelated, the colours they chose are great too. Very 90s.

    8. +RZHYHUWKHUH¶VDVXEWOH\HWLPSRUWDQWGLIIHUHQFHEHWZHHQWKHXQHPSOR\PHQWUDWHLQFUHDVLQJE\SHUFHQWDJHSRLQWVDQGVHYHUDOKXQGUHGWKRXVDQGSHRSOHOHIWMREOHVV7KHIRUPHUUHDGVDVDQXPEHUZLWKRXWPXFKFRQWH[WZKHUHDVWKHODWWHULVPRUHUHODWDEOH

      Very important to keep in mind. It's so easy to get caught up in the moral/ethical/political "simplicity" of data, but it is important to remember the faces those numbers represent, to help us double-check our decisions and commitments (especially politically).

    9. 5HPHPEHUGDWDLVDUHSUHVHQWDWLRQRIUHDOOLIH,W¶VQRWMXVWDEXFNHWRIQXPEHUV

      This ties in with last weeks annotations, where I talked about the inherent political nature of data/algorithms. This is the same idea, except I believe the author is going to put a more positive spin on things.

    1. BlackFeminismasTheoreticalandMethodologicalApproach

      I didn't want to highlight this entire paragraph, but wow. This sort of academia is what I was hoping to find in Gender Studies at UNBC (which I attended 3-4 classes of before the Professor's internalized transphobia became a part of the curriculum and I dropped out, disappointed both in the course and the professor). I don't really have anything academic or at least intelligent to add here. I just love being able to see Black Feminist views represented in my own schooling. Diversity is so incredibly important.

    2. racializedcapitalism

      This is not a term I have seen in my own activism but it's one I want to start using. Capitalism does function to increase profits by any means necessary - and the oppression of people of colour - and particularly Black Americans - is very profitable. First slavery, of course - but now the porn industry as mentioned in this chapter, among other things.

    3. Ratherthanassertthatproblematicorracistresultsareimpossibletocorrect,inthewaysthattheGoogledisclaimersuggests,17Ibelieveafeministlens,coupledwithracialawarenessabouttheintersectionalaspectsofidentity,offersnewgroundandinterpretationsforunderstandingtheimplicationsofsuchproblematicpositionsaboutthebenigninstrumentalityoftechnologies.Blackfeministwaysofknowing,forexample,canlookatsearchesontermssuchas“blackgirls”andbringintotheforegroundevidenceaboutthehistoricaltendenciestomisrepresentBlackwomeninthemedia.Ofcourse,thesemisrepresentationsandtheuseofbigdatatomaintainandexacerbatesocialrelationshipsserveapowerfulroleinmaintainingracialandgendersubjugation.ItisthepersistentnormalizationofBlackpeopleasaberrantandundeservingofhumanrightsanddignityunderthebannersofpublicsafety,technologicalinnovation,andtheemergingcreativeeconomythatIamdirectlychallengingbyshowingtheegregiouswaysthatdehumanizationisrenderedalegitimatefree-markettechnologyproject

      It's incredible to see determination and activism included in this chapter. Even just reading it makes me feel a little hopeless; like activists are always fighting uphill - or up a cliff. I'm glad the author is so determined. It brings me hope for future activism, both in academia and out.

    4. Bydoingthis,Iampurposefullytheorizingfromafeministperspective,whileaddressingoften-overlookedaspectsofraceinfeministtheoriesoftechnology.

      And outside of technology! Feminism as a movement is notoriously white. We will always need Black women, and Hispanic women, and women of all races and/or ethnicities in feminism and academia as a whole. Feminism that excludes any woman is not feminism.

    5. SinceIbeganwritingthisbook,Google’sparentcompany,Alphabet,hasexpandeditspowerintodronetechnology,8military-graderobotics,fibernetworks,andbehavioralsurveillancetechnologiessuchasNestandGoogleGlass.9Thesearejustseveralofmanyentrypointstothinkingabouttheimplicationsofartificialintelligenceasahumanrightsissue.Weneedtobeconcernedaboutnotonlyhowideasandpeoplearerepresentedbutalsotheethicsofwhetherrobotsandotherformsofautomateddecisionmakingcanendalife,asinthecaseofdronesandautomatedweapons.Towhomdoweappeal?Whatbodiesgovernartificialintelligence,andwheredoesthepublicraiseissuesorlodgecomplaintswithnationalandinternationalcourts?Thesequestionshaveyettobefullyanswered.

      This is also why Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and other "smart homes" are absolutely terrifying. Technological dystopia hellscape! Technological dystopia hellscape!

    6. AtthecoreofmyargumentisthewayinwhichGooglebiasessearchtoitsowneconomicinterests—foritsprofitabilityandtobolsteritsmarketdominanceatanyexpense

      I have been trying to avoid the word "money" in my annotations to avoid coming off as anti-capitalist as I really am, but yes: Corporations do not give a care about individuals or marginalized groups outside of how they can profit off of their oppression. Remember this June; this Pride Month; that any company selling you rainbow merchandise is not doing it out of legitimate care about LGBTQ+ rights but because it's profitable! Yes, even if they're giving 20% of proceeds to charity - where do you think the other 80% goes?

    7. ledtotheoverincarcerationofBlackdefendants.

      Hypothes.is doesn't like to let me annotate over page breaks, but this annotation is for the whole sentence.

      This doesn't really surprise me, given the over-representation of Black Americans in prisons now (The Central Park 5 are just the tip of the iceberg of wrongfully convicted Black (and Hispanic) Americans, but they come to mind). Even an algorithm built on "apolitical" data would represent this racist trend.

    8. Thepoliticalnatureofsearchdemonstrateshowalgorithmsareafundamentalinventionofcomputerscientistswhoarehumanbeings—andcodeisalanguagefullofmeaningandappliedinvaryingwaystodifferenttypesofinformation

      This ties in really nicely and furthers my last annotation about newspapers: anything created by humans is likely political in some sense. The picture of apoliticalness (which is not a real word, but I can't find a better one) is perhaps a robot, but we have seen robots built to deter homeless people from setting up camp in certain areas, which is a very political move. It's important to be aware that behind anything - even the things you enjoy - is a person, and you may not even know their motivations for what they do.

    9. heavilyusedtechnologicalartifactssuchasthesearchenginehavebecomesuchanormativepartofourexperiencewithdigitaltechnologyandcomputersthattheysocializeusintobelievingthattheseartifactsmustthereforealsoprovideaccesstocredible,accurateinformationthatisdepoliticizedandneutral

      They mentioned above that "Problematic representations and biases in classifications are not new," and I find that works well in tandem with this segment as well, because this quote also applies to the news. People see news and newspapers as apolitical; simply reporting events. Reporting is inherently political, and news stations and newspapers are endorsed or sponsored by politicians/political parties. They can still be credible sources, but I am always keenly aware of the type of language used in their articles.

    10. Ofcourse,uponreflection,IrealizedthatIhadbeenusingthewebandsearchtoolslongbeforetheencountersIexperiencedjustoutofviewofmyyoungfamilymembers.ItwasjustastroublingtorealizethatIhadundoubtedlybeenconfrontedwiththesametypeofresultsbeforebuthadlearned,orbeentrained,tosomehowbecomeinuredtoit,totakeitasagiventhatanysearchImightperformusingkeywordsconnectedtomyphysicalselfandidentitycouldreturnpornographicandotherwisedisturbingresults.WhywasthisthebargainintowhichIhadtacitlyenteredwithdigitalinformationtools?Andwhoamongusdidnothavetobargaininthisway?

      After explaining the premise of this chapter, I read this line to my dad, saying I have experiences similar things (once again, with pornographic fandom content featuring children's cartoons or child characters), and he started talking about how "it depends on the search terms used." I'm a little shocked that he isn't bothered in the slightest that the search term "black girls" returns nothing but porn, but I guess that certainly tells you something about white men in our society.

    11. Forthesereasons,adeeperexplorationintothehistoricalandsocialconditionsthatgiverisetoproblematicsearchresultsisinorder

      That's a biiiiiig field of study. That's basically all of history; all of gender studies; all of queer studies.... etc etc. We should always be trying to further understand bigotry so that we can further combat it, but it feels like a never-ending task to me.

    12. enginethatistheproblembut,rather,theusersofsearchengineswhoare.Itsuggeststhatwhatismostpopularissimplywhatrisestothetopofthesearchpile.Whileservingasanimportantanddisturbingcritiqueofsexistattitudes,thecampaignfailstoimplicatethealgorithmsorsearchenginesthatdrivecertainresultstothetop

      This is a very good observation. Too often people place the blame on individuals and not corporations - a good example is the infamous McDonalds coffee lawsuit. People make fun of a lady for suing McDonalds because their coffee was "hot" when in reality she suffered second and third degree burns to her genitals and thighs due to her coffee being hotter than 100 degrees. While I don't necessarily think propaganda was involved in the McDonalds case, I wouldn't be surprised if it was with others. Corporations/companies are not your friends. They just want their money.

    13. “Theadsareshockingbecausetheyshowjusthowfarwestillhavetogotoachievegenderequality.Theyareawakeupcall,andwehopethatthemessagewilltravelfar.”

      In the words of Heather Heyer: "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." I find it hard to miss the sexism in our society, let alone others in the world. If all it takes is some search autofills to make you see that women's rights are still an issue, you weren't paying nearly enough attention already. I find it kind of sad that this project had such an easy time shocking people; and that it's such an easy project to do in the first place.

  2. May 2019
    1. Humanities faculty, unlike their STEM counterparts, do not have labs. We do not have a place for our work and no one sees our process.

      Is this implying that people do see progress in labs? Or that somehow labs are in a way accessible for people to come in and view academic research in progress? If that's a thing that happens, I'd love to check in on the labs of more advanced students, but I have a strong feeling that simply asking to be in a lab and watch people work will be met with quite a bit of resistance.

    2. However, that work (and it is intellectual labor) is invisible and largely undervalued.

      In my microbiology lab in the January semester I realized for the first time exactly how much work goes into a paper. It gave me a healthy respect for published academics, as well as made me realize, immediately, I do not want to stay in academia my whole life. Some people are incredible with the amount of effort they put into their research.

    3. Academics are constantly being told that they need to make their work more relevant and accessible to the public. Blogging about your work hits both of those marks. It also means that you have to translate your work from academese to language that non-academics will understand (i.e. jargon) and also foreground the relevance of your work. You have to tell people why your work is important and what it adds to the world.

      Do you ever wish you read the whole article before annotating because you read one paragraph down and find out the article says the exact thing you said in your annotation? Yeah. Well, at least I feel validated in my constant search for accessible academic content.

    4. As a result, I suggest that one thing that all humanities scholars can do to take a baby step in the direction of digital humanities is to maintain a blog about their research.

      Oh, what a coincidence that our major project in this class is to maintain a blog about our findings! Joking aside, I wish articles came with a link to a blog about the research involved in them. No matter how many times I read and re-read the methods section I never can seem to fully understand what the researchers were doing, because I'm an undergraduate just scratching the surface of topics. A blog would have more casual details and wouldn't assume the audience knows a lot already and would allow me to learn without having to delve for 80 hours down a rabbit hole about a specific enzyme in one microbe to figure out why it was even mentioned. Or maybe I'm just not a natural born student!

    1. “People will use this data in ways we can’t even imagine yet,” Mr. Stowell said, “and I think that is one of the most exciting developments in the humanities.”

      I keep coming back to history in my annotations, and honestly the article could work as a reading in a history class too. This kind of collection of data; of sources for the future could do wonders for future historians. Digital records, especially those online, don't burn or get water damaged or get eaten by moths. I think it's very important that we consider our digital footprints in a historical sense, from our own personal data (which I can see functioning much the same way as diaries do for historians now) to larger projects such as the tapestry mentioned above.

    2. Mr. Edelstein said that many of his senior colleagues view his work as whimsical, the result of playing with technological toys. But he argues such play can lead to discoveries.

      As he should; he's correct. Technological advances come from "playing with technological toys" all the time, it's no stretch of the imagination to assume academic advances would as well. Of course people are always resistant to change; it's in our nature, but using the tools at our disposal to improve our work is a part of academia.

    3. “You would think if England was this fountainhead of freedom and religious tolerance,” he said, “there would have been greater continuing interest there than what our correspondence map shows us.”

      While I am not surprised that the extent of England's greatness was greatly exaggerated (given our colonial, euro, and white -centric views of history) it's very important to have the data and evidence to back it up.

    4. Even historians, who have used databases before, have been slow to embrace the trend. Just one of the nearly 300 main panels scheduled for next year’s annual meeting of the American Historical Association covers digital matters.

      We explored the expansion of digital records briefly in HIST211 in the January semester. One of the issues with history is having very few (if any) primary sources, but a bigger issue is that they often contradict each other. Digital databanks and scans of old documents and even sites like ancestry.ca have broadened sources available to historians but they also cause more contradictions to be found, making the reconstruction of any historical event/period potentially more difficult.

    5. Mr. Bobley said the emerging field of digital humanities is probably best understood as an umbrella term covering a wide range of activities, from online preservation and digital mapping to data mining and the use of geographic information systems.

      Honestly the category of digital humanities seems like it could do with being split into two (or several) smaller fields of study. I'm sure it already is, the same way ecology and ornithology are both biology, but at least with biology it can be summarized as "the study of life" - with digital humanities I still struggle to come up with something like that - "the study of anything that could possibly be explored further/easier with anything similar to a computer?"

    6. This alliance of geeks and poets has generated exhilaration and also anxiety. The humanities, after all, deal with elusive questions of aesthetics, existence and meaning, the words that bring tears or the melody that raises goose bumps. Are these elements that can be measured? Advertisement Continue reading the main story “The digital humanities do fantastic things,” said the eminent Princeton historian Anthony Grafton. “I’m a believer in quantification. But I don’t believe quantification can do everything. So much of humanistic scholarship is about interpretation.”

      Not to argue with the New York Times and a Princeton Historian, but are the digital humanities really limited to quantification? I think that's perhaps a bit of a narrow minded opinion, or that I'm misinterpreting. For example, digital art or the study of digital artwork could be considered digital humanities, and I don't think that digital art has anything to do with quantification.

      I do understand the idea that quantification and data can't "deal with elusive questions of aesthetics, existence and meaning, the words that bring tears or the melody that raises goose bumps" (frankly an awful sentence, but that's besides the point) without human interpretation. I've seen some truly horrifying or very encouraging statistics before that can evoke these responses like a piece of literature, but the statistics alone do not embody those reactions.

    1. A Historical 3D Model: Digital Magnesia

      Does it count as an annotation if I just think something is REALLY COOL? No, probably not, but WOW.

    2. Omeka.org (which forms the basis of the site), or you could use Omeka.net if you aren’t so picky about the way the site looks and acts

      Presumably you don't need this website to make a gallery of primary sources? I could make a page with images, links/citation information, and the summaries of the sources with any website and basic html. I assume this specific gallery is made using omeka?

    3. Many  students tell me that in order to get started with digital humanities, they’d like to have some idea of what they might do and what technical skills they might need in order to do it.

      Applies to myself as well. I still feel that I don't have a grasp on what "digital humanities" are, even after week one. "Humanities" is such a broad scope of subjects - are digital humanities primarily about text analysis, data collection, software/programming, languages, human communication, or something else? Knowing what sort of skills are involved in the field could help me understand better.

    1. The need to avoid duplication of effort also led to consolidation in the area of text archiving and maintenance.

      In my experiences with file management and organization, this is incredibly easy to relate to. I can't imagine consolidating entire databases of texts from different historians when even on my own personal laptop I can sometimes find four or more copies of the same program, downloaded again and again. I keep being surprised by the amount of work involved in this history of computing in the humanities.

    2. The TuStep software modules are in use to this day and set very high standards of scholarship in dealing with all phases from data entry and collation to the production of complex print volumes.

      This is... really, really impressive. The fact that the modules are still effective more than 50 years later is astounding, given how quickly technological advances have been occurring in this period, particularly in the last 20 years (at least from my own, admittedly narrow, understanding).

    3. This period also saw the establishment of computing facilities in some major language academies in Europe, principally to assist with the compilation of dictionaries.

      While I assume hand-compiled dictionaries likely existed prior to this time, I have never made the connection between programming and dictionaries. It definitely makes sense now, though, as I think about the vast number of words in the English language alone.

    4. A purely mechanical concordance program, where words are alphabetized according to their graphic forms (sequences of letters), could have produced a result in much less time, but Busa would not be satisfied with this. He wanted to produce a "lemmatized" concordance where words are listed under their dictionary headings, not under their simple forms.

      I don't understand this. "Lemmatized" is in quotations but is not explained, meaning I had to google it to understand that it means "different forms of a word are grouped together," such as to walk, walking, will walk, etc. I still do not know what this means by "dictionary headings," as the only thing I can picture still is the word "walk" in an alphabetical list, with all variants of "walk" under it. Is this what it means? That seems rather alphabetical to me.

    5. to make an index verborum of all the words in the works of St Thomas Aquinas and related authors, totaling some 11 million words of medieval Latin.

      11 million words is an astronomical amount of writing. To put this in perspective, many short novels could be as few as 50 thousand. To attempt this in 1949 is impressive, if not mindblowing.