16 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2022
    1. Student sentiments tend to include more sentiments about what their institutions are doing in connection with on-campus life and sustainability, rather than solely on how the institution is engaging with its carbon footprint outside of the school. 

      Very interesting point! This project shows a lot of interesting information about the school's commitment to environmental justice, even it is not always shown through with the institutions' practices. The way that this project approaches the animations and explanations with how it connects to the overall themes is great--there is so much to unpack here with how the institutions approach environmental issues.

    1. Outside of the first time period, Vassar has consistently seen a very high ratio of “Women/Woman” usage over time. There is virtually no usage of the other terms in the more recent times, except for a few negligible percentage in 1960-1970. This aligns with our initial hypothesis of a rise in “Women/Woman” and a decrease in the other terms.

      The data here aligns with the progressive nature that specific liberal arts colleges hold, especially when they were all women's colleges before. The hypothesis that the words "woman/women" would increase in use over time but the fact that it stayed consistently high with Vassar makes a lot of sense. Overall this project shows such interesting conclusions and creates a very great picture of how the word use has evolved over time.

  2. Jul 2022
    1. Linking back to the ‘Digital Humanities (Burdick, A., et al)’, the first and most obvious method that we have used is distant reading

      "Distant reading" has been a huge help in the progression of my parts in the project. Particular language patterns help guide the analyses of how language is used and how the uses developed over time. And, the visibility aspect that comes from it does help. Since you may see how many times a certain word shows up in a text, historical context may lead us to how more groups became visible over time, as more terms become more frequently used. As such, distant reading helped guide a lot of the analysis when looking at the time periods I'm looking at (1970s-2020s).

    1. In this graph, we’ve visualized the overall count of each major female pronoun in our public sources. Each use of an identified pronoun in our sources is represented by a single unit here. Using this graph we can compare the different occurrences of these words.

      The implications that this data has are pretty expansive. I feel as if there's a lot to be said about the use of language here and how both the frequency and the specific word represent potential power dynamics. The difference in these words, more or less, can come down to its connotation in most cases, so their meanings have greater implications towards their use as well.

    1. We were wondering how that might have been reflected in documents and objects pertaining to student life at the LACOL colleges, and more specifically how other students’ feelings and attitudes toward women have evolved over time. 

      I believe this point is extremely important, this topic is honestly so deep and layered--it'll turn out great. What I think that will be great from this topic is the preservation of the historical records of fighting against this discrimination. It is quite unfortunate that we still have to be fighting for these rights, but this project acts as a contribution to the activism against restricting peoples' freedoms.

    1. Campus newspaper articles produced around the time the selected supreme court decisions were made, student interviews, health center records (if accessible), College courses and professors’ interviews.

      In my group's project, we plan to use newspaper articles as a source of data as well, since the timely information serves a greater purpose in the project. Since we have the historical data contributing to the analysis of the themes, we're looking to find archival data on the women's school, Kirkland College, for the project. Also, the articles around the times of the Supreme Court dates speaks to the larger outcry in regards to the decisions. The women's rights movements have been very prominent in college historical records and I'm glad to see that especially in a time when the movement will come around again--it is these very decisions perpetuating that.

    1. I agree with this point because I looked at "Murder Map" as well and it did not resonate with what I wanted to do with the blog post I wrote, since the fact that it was archived and hasn't been updated doesn't make it very accessible. I understand that there's not much we can do but the information it provides is important in the context of race relations and other social movements. However, the fact that it was through the Wayback Machine did give me some hope because at least what the concept attempted to do is preserved by an accessible digital internet archive.

    1. The great French semiotician of maps, Jacques Bertin(Opens in a new window), identified seven graphic variables: color, tone, size, shape, texture, orientation, and position. He was showing that graphic display could use these systematically (for example, color can be symbolic). Common education rarely introduces basic knowledge of graphical meaning production. Think about something as basic as the distinction between juxtaposition of two objects and a hierarchy of one on top of the other—the semantics of these two are radically different. Juxtaposition implies parity instead of hierarchy.

      I want to emphasize this point for a few reason, but mainly because the meaning changes based on quite a few factors when it comes to visualization. Some of these things some people don't think about when it comes to the semantics of the visualization. For instance, certain colors and certain sizes and shapes create different meanings, yet taking it as face value is all that some may muster up. White can mean angelic, or pure, holding different connotations based on the agreed upon semantics of society.

    1. Overall, all the Voyant tools show a type of complicated power hierarchy and so does the book.

      I agree with this point because many of the power hierarchies these words represent have a lot to do with gender and class. There are so many themes present throughout the book, given that I had the same results, Voyant was a great tool for allowing me to digest these power relations in a different way. Especially since Daisy represented a struggle within the main character about his class, I think there's so much to say about not only how that part of the book developed; it was presented to the audience by a narrator influencing our thoughts while still falling prey to the hegemonic norms. So yeah I do believe the power hierarchy is complex as shown by Voyant.

    1. Rethinking digital pedagogy in this way not only allows students and instructors with varied access to electronic technologies to explore new kinds of assignments, but it also creates useful linkages between thinking about the materiality of print artifacts and that of digital texts.

      The hands-on approach in terms of being able to look at a text in terms of digitalized media, I believe that Fyfe's proposition of an assignment to use physical items instead of the digital to enact certain parts of the brain that allowed for the discovery of patterns through data visualization. I believe that it is truly best to be rethinking the type of pedagogy in learning. In terms of textual analysis, the interactions with the physical objects could allow for a deeper understanding of what the text entails since that physical connection with a piece creates a more thorough understanding of it. Personally, I cannot write my notes online because of this interactions with the mind and body. I feel as if I am able to connect deeper with tangible objects rather than digital objects, but I have always adapted to the digital.

    1. Who defined these terms, and how was an object’s creation date identified?

      I have a similar question when it comes to these types of discrepancies within the data. "No date" and "date unknown" for this type of data is crucial to understand it and putting no date on the data paints the data with no context, no placement within the larger set of data, making the data harder to use. Plus, not having the resources to fill in this type of information should be something notified within the data for accessibility, in my opinion.

  3. Jun 2022
    1. he Journal of Homophobic Events has the best metadata, containing a good description, the language, terms of use, permalink, MIME type, and even the raw files exposed (showing the file name, size, and extension).

      The Journal of Homophobic Events had some of the best metadata out of any of the objects from the week. The Journal has a description, which is more metadata than a lot of objects tend to have. In this sense, the information provided gives a general overview of the content while remaining concise about it. I feel this is an accessible model for the topic, but I feel as if there could be more. I mean more in terms of the origin, historical context, etc. More of the why? to get the journal going well. I agree with the lack of standardization but I believe that standardizing can be inaccessible in some regards.

    1. In other words, capturing data is not passively accepting what is given, but actively constructing what one is interested in.[6]

      This point about data is important because sometimes in media, the word is portrayed as a throw-away word--I mean this in the sense that it implies "something important" translated into numbers and statistics but it can mean way too many things. The definition is too broad for it to mean something of substance. In this sense though, I believe that it also comes down to a visibility issue, since data can be used to minimize a group to numbers or statistics. In this.manner, data can be constructed to represent different groups better by perhaps providing metadata in the context of the situation, which would allow for a deeper understanding for cultural and social implications for the data. I think the definition provided in the chapter for data in the humanities takes into context this issue, since it provides the room to provide visibility in some context. Smart data achieves this through its clean approach to data since it actually involves the human voice and autonomy. With this improvement, it could be less of a exhibitionist approach that the term "data" tends to hold in today's societal and academic perceptions.

    1. It also allows the Enslaved project members to make their database easily searchable and interlinked, a major advantage over traditional archives.

      I want to echo this point about the database making it more advantageous, since it coincides with the exact idea that you mention later: they want to secure the humanity of those that weren't able to have that autonomy. There are so many records of human life lost for the fact that it was not valued as much as others, and it reminds me of the erasure Indigenous people face as well. The repression and potential subsequent loss of their native languages, the lack of acknowledgement for their humanity in many cases, (i.e. Ecuador is currently dealing with numerous lives lost in regards to Indigenous rights now), so a database as so crucial for the history of many different people. I wonder if there is something as such for specific Indigenous peoples around the world.

    1. And to enable those operations, which range from counting to sorting and from modeling to visualizing, the data must be placed into some kind of category—if not always into a conceptual category like gender, then at the least into a computational category like Boolean

      To bring up an earlier point, while quantitatively recording data to be used computationally may be empowering, I want to reiterate how it can be harmful as well. It's unfortunate because the nature of how computers work and how everything must be categorized is an actual issue, considering the categories that are made were made by humans too--they will contain all the biases and issues that we have as well, we just shape it to our needs at that moment.

    1. The digital humanities seems another space within the academy where the divide between making and interpreting might be bridged in productive ways.

      The dichotomous nature of Digital Humanities poses a couple of questions for me: what are the barriers for entry in this discipline? The extent of interdisciplinarity is nearly limitless, but what kinds of disciplines were prioritized? The idea of “making” intrigued me in its definition when it was coupled with “interpreting,” since making allows for an easier time when interpreting the items that were digitized, since digitization is so normalized now. I’d assume that now since the way that society seems to be shifting toward a world that is increasingly digitized in every way. Especially given the benefits and convenience that digitization provides to humanity, digital humanities could dissolve into simply being included with other disciplines.