On October 10, I attended one of a series of workshops presented by the CUNY New Media Lab on recording quality audio and visuals, which was presented to us in the context of workshops that would be helpful for researchers interested in digital archives.
The information I found the most helpful were the technical breakdowns of concepts like aperture, shutter speed, and ISO and how those all fit together into film exposure. The workshop also offered practical advice like examples of shot lists and the hot tip to always have technical redundancies on hand in case something isn’t charged or working for whatever reason. I have filmed projects before but largely flying by the seat of my pants, so having this professional breakdown was really helpful to me, and especially helped in thinking through my work plan for video interviewing in my final project proposal.
You can find the presentation slides in OneDrive, and both Stefano and David seem like great resources for any future questions!
In early November, on election week, New York Times Tech Guild (NYTTG) members called the largest tech worker strike in US history. Nearly 700-unit members — about half of whom are remote workers located across the country — logged out of their work laptops and walked out to the 8th Avenue and virtual picket lines. Eight days later, the strike ended abruptly with no additional bargaining time with management, no contract agreement, and — to put it politely — a strongly re-engaged and opinionated membership.
This project will have two main aspects. Firstly, it will serve to chronicle the NYTTG strike — featuring a timeline, interviews, and details of both the in-person and remote strikes. Because the unit’s contract negotiation is still underway, this part of the project is the most sensitive to updates in the ongoing negotiations. Since I am also a member of the NYTTG unit, I’m uniquely positioned to both adapt to changes in the state of the contract fight and to access members of the unit for interviews and internal documents to help illustrate more of the internal mechanics of the strike for those outside of the unit. Consulting with the CUNY Human Research Protection Program has been helpful in determining the structures and supports (like interviewee consent forms) that will help me to distinguish between my roles as unit member and researcher.
Additionally, the project will involve the development of at least one reusable open-source organizing tool to help aid future remote strikers. During the first few days of the work stoppage, unit members made apps that made some of the logistics of the strike easier — a chant sharing application to sync up leaders on the picket line, and a text messaging application to quickly message contacts reminders of upcoming actions. That innovation happened in the midst of a lot of chaos and moving parts of the strike; much more could have been streamlined by tech worker intervention with a little bit of organization and focus. The semester-long timeline of this project will provide a time-bound incubator to talk to other union shops about innovation that would benefit them and to develop an MVP version of a tool that could be used by future workers.
In thinking about organizing the work plan, I envision four key deliverables that will come together into the final project: background research about the current state of remote and tech unions in the US and a survey of a diverse set of units’ needs; interviews with members of the NYTTG; development of an MVP organizing tool that responds to identified need; and development of a website that brings it all together. I’ve tried to organize the scopes of work so that there are consistent and diverse learning opportunities for each member of the team, and no single “crunch” point or bottleneck for the work to come together. I’m optimistic that the project could provide opportunities for all participating colleagues to practice their archival, research, interview, and web development skills, and am excited about the possibilities it holds for future organizing.
Wow! Voyant is so powerful and accessible. Personally, I am really curious about what goes into building a tool like this.
The thing I enjoyed the most about exploring the text mining resources was actually looking through the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database. How rich! I think it would be really interesting to try to look through this specifically for Black newspapers throughout the country over time.
Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]), 08 Jan. 1911. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
I played with entering some of these texts in Voyant as well as personal writing and cover letters. I found this tool easier to experiment with and reason about than the more at-large data vis tools, which makes sense because they are designed for a smaller subset of use cases.
As with our other praxis assignments, it’s hard for me to really get in the weeds and reason about the use of these tools without a defined problem or question to work through. I think so much of what is interesting about Digital Humanities are the lines of inquiry that open up to us when using these powerful tools, and I’m interested in better learning how to ask meaningful questions.
From the readings this week, I saw two major themes emerge:
Distant vs. close reading (perhaps as a parallel for structural vs. individual patterns)
It’s ironic to me that Jocker makes the claim that close reading has been rendered “totally inappropriate” and then goes on to — at least Mandel argues — recreate or embed a sexist structure within his distant reading analysis.
Something like… negative definition? Defining something by its relation to other things (how like or unlike it is)
In So & Roland, “white” and “black texts” defined relative to each other
I found it rich in meaning that the absence of the word “white” in a text was a strong indicator that a text was by a white author; whiteness defined by its very absence
Comp titles being a means of defining what kind of books are expected to find commercial success
A parallel in Mandel’s discussion of the conservatism of statistics and Bayesian probability
Questions I have coming out of the reading:
Mandel criticizes Jocker’s analysis as veering from a study of style instead to mere counting. How does one find the line between such approaches, especially when using quantitative methods?
Maybe Mandel argues that there never is a line, it’s always both? (“The biological binary…is a textual and numerical” [production].)
The shift in the So & Roland essay from categorizing texts along a racial binary to instead a spectrum of probability seemed brilliant, and opened up a lot of avenues of inquiry. And Mandel speaks of “animat[ing] numerical processes.” But it feels hard to know how to design projects this way from the outset. Do you find that after some time in the field, digital humanists can kind of “slice and dice” their research questions this way or is it really a matter of experimenting and seeing which way the data leads the research?
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![Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]), 08 Jan. 1911. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.](https://dhintro2024.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/34698/files/2024/10/download-3-1024x975.png)
