Author Archives: Charlotte Harding

Gaelic: Language, Land, and Data

My project will use an ArcGIS story map to walk through the history of Scottish Gaelic culture and geographic distribution of the language over time. ArcGIS storymaps are websites that allow the user to scroll through maps, animations, images, and texts in a semi-chronological manner. I encourage you to look through the gallery here for examples that best illustrate what a story map is: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-storymaps/gallery/. Though the story map allows for a chronological narrative structure, it also allows for interaction from the user. Tabs at the top of the site allow the user to skip around at their leisure. Additionally, interactive maps can be embedded into the story.  

To this end, I wish to create a storymap that goes from the introduction of Gaelic language in Scotland in 500 AD through to the passing of the Gaelic Language Act in 2005. This will be done through historical events, legislature, the publication of literature and music, and other moments that changed the perception and prevalence of Gaelic over time. Each historical moment will be anchored in a location on the map of Scotland. The user will be zoomed into a specific part of the map as they move through history, taking a tour while moving through time. Finally, I hope to embed an interactive map of Scotland that shows the census data of Gaelic skill levels from 2001, 2011, and 2022. The user will be able to toggle which combination of skill level they wish to look at, total count of speakers, percentage of speakers per area, or percent change. This will allow the user to explore and visualize the data in different ways.  

Great work is already being done in the realm of Digital Humanities and Gaelic studies. For example, the Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic (https://dasg.ac.uk/en) is an online repository of Gaelic texts, fieldwork materials such as interviews and surveys, as well as audio recordings of vernacular Gaelic. Scotland’s Map of Stories (https://mapofstories.scot/language/english/) is an interactive map of Scotland that links counties and towns to video recordings of stories in English, Scots, and Gaelic. These videos aim to keep the rich tradition of oral storytelling alive in a digital format. Additionally, the government website, https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/atlas/, has census maps that visualize Scotland’s census data, including language skills. I hope to contribute to this work by allowing a space for users to explore the entirety of the Gaelic census data while having historical contextual material all in one place. After learning about Gaelic history as it relates to geography, I hope the story map user will be interested in exploring and visualizing the change in language skills in different counties and pondering how these changes in geographic distribution affect Gaelic culture overall.  

GaelicLanguageMapsPPT.pptx

Intro to Mapping with QGIS Reflection

On November 20th, I attended the Intro to Mapping with QGIS workshop led by Parisa Sateyesh through CUNY digital fellows. The workshop started with short introductions that included each participant’s interest in mapping with QGIS. I was excited for this workshop as it related to my final project goal of mapping language change in Scotland.  

I enjoyed the introduction to the practical part of the workshop. Ms. Sateyesh discussed how maps are not neutral representations of a universal reality, rather they are social constructs. Maps are tools of communication and are often used to represent relationships of power. Ms. Sateyesh shared her screen to show a fascinating map that questions our assumptions about the United States. It was a map of indigenous territories. Rather than the stark lines and colors separating the colonized states, this map had many overlapping structures and almost translucent colors to allow for the overlapping areas.  

I also enjoyed how Ms. Sateyesh went through chronologically the questions one must ask themselves when one wants to build a map. For example, one must ask “what story do I wish to tell?”, “What is my budget”, “What is my timeline?”, and “Do I want a static or interactive map?” Finally, one must find the proper data files to create a map. At the very least, one ust have a spatial data file that contains the geometry points to populate in QGIS. After that, one must gather the data files relevant to the research question. 

For the practical part of the workshop, we aimed to create a map of NYC that plots 10 popular sites to compare neighborhood data on median household income. To begin, we cleaned our data files and imported the spatial data into QGIS. I quickly found that my computer could not handle running zoom and QGIS at the same time. To continue with the workshop, I closed QGIS and followed along while taking notes on each step. Once it came time to import the secondary location data file, most of my peers had technical difficulties. The facilitators helped by explaining which settings to toggle, but it was unclear why those settings were that way. Overall, the technical difficulties took away some time and we did not end with the map we set out to create. During my mapping praxis project, I played around with QGIS before settling on Tableau for my final product. I found the ‘playing around’ and trial and error to be very effective in helping my understanding of the software. I did not find the workshop to help my understanding as much. 

Overall, I highly enjoyed the conceptual discussion on mapping with QGIS and the organization suggestions provided by the facilitators. 

Reading Response

During this week’s reading, three keywords emerged: embodiment, privacy, and pedagogy. A Life Lived in Media by Deuze, Blank, & Speers made me think of social media in an entirely new way. Instead of media being a separate object with which we interact, this article asserts that media is intertwined with our reality. They write that media “produces reality in terms of the reality it records, redacts, selects and thereby constructs.” They also argue that we construct ourselves and our identity through media. Parham builds upon this when discussing the embodiment of our interconnection with media. The physical movements associated with media such as swiping and scrolling become embodied habits that shape our lived experience. Parham also describes the term haunting as to “experience other people’s memories with the affective impact of personal, firsthand experience.” This embodiment of emotion can be felt through prevalent stories of injustice and violence shared through media.  

A line from A Life lived in Media that stuck with me was “It used to take effort to be public. Today, it often takes effort to be private.” Anyone who has gone through setting up a social media account will find this to be true. This sense of visibility can be dangerous for certain groups. Additionally, it leads to discussions such as that in Walsh’s piece. How do we cite social media data? How do we ensure credit is given to the real people behind the data while preserving privacy and digital safety?  

Finally, I was very intrigued about Chatelain’s discussion on #FergusonSyllabus project. I did not know previously about the value (at least in regard to obtaining tenure) placed on scholarship as opposed to teaching. How does this affect academics across all grades and disciplines? Chatelain also mentions creating an age-appropriate teaching method for issues such race, gender, class, etc. I think this is a great idea to teach a new social justice-oriented generation. However, what obstacles, legislative, social, etc. would stand in the way?  

Text Analysis Praxis

For the text analysis praxis assignment, I mostly explored Voyant and the JSTOR text analyzer, Constellate. Voyant was a very self-explanatory and easy to use platform. You can either upload your text or paste it directly in the text box. Then, the tool creates multiple visualizations based on that text. My first step was to choose which text to dive into. I knew I wanted it to be a simple text. Additionally, I wanted to explore something personal to me, that might reveal something pertinent to my life. To this end, I copy and pasted my two personal statements from my grad school applications into Voyant. The statistics revealed that the words used most frequently are data, children, education, and trauma. This is very much in line with my purpose going into grad school, as I am a QMSS student focusing on trauma in education. My favorite visualization was the one where my frequently used words were connected to one another. This allowed me to see not only the main themes, but how they came together to make one cohesive argument. I also noticed Voyant’s use of the word ‘Reveal’ as the button to generate the statistics. This implies there is a truth hidden within the text that must be unveiled. 

Using Constellate, I decided to explore published texts that contain the word ‘gaelic’ to stay with the theme of my previous mapping project. The visualization generated was a graph that showed the amount of texts with that keyword published over time. Furthermore, I could explore word frequencies within that sample of texts. I had a lot of fun with this feature, looking at what concepts were more and less prevalent at certain times in history. For example, both the percentage and total amount of texts published about gaelic in Ireland was much larger than those published about gaelic in Scotland. During this exploration, I found myself thinking of our readings that insist that data is never neutral and requires close reading and interpretation. For example, if you switch the summary metric from percentage to total count, an entirely different story is told. This not only requires transparency from the statistician, but attention and prior knowledge from the audience. 

Open Access/Minimal Computing/Digital Scholarship

My understanding of Open Access was best described by the Budapest Open Access Initiative as quoted by Peter Suber: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.” Scholars are in a unique position in which revenue loss is not an issue in open access publication and that the nature of their work is to produce public knowledge. 

While reading Fitzpatrick’s ‘Working in Public’, two keywords emerged for me: Visibility and Community.  Fitzpatrick makes sure to note the significant risks that come along with the visibility of making one’s work public and open access. These risks compound when the author is writing about topics such as social justice and when their identity is subject to discrimination or oppression. When speaking on public scholarship, Fitzpatrick writes “members of our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants, as stakeholders, and as partners.”  This reminded me of last week’s reading on the Possibly Impossible Research Project. In that project, the students and teacher moved away from such traditional roles and became more like collaborators in the quest for knowledge. Working in public also involves a breakdown of these rigid roles, allowing for the scholar and the audience to create more of a community.  

In ‘Hybrid Publishing’, it was interesting to learn that community is what drives Manifold’s development and flexibility. For example, certain features were a direct response to Manifold being used by communities in classroom settings.  

When reading “Minimal Computing”, I thought to my own community of this class. During praxis assignment presentations, I have often heard my classmates make decisions that align with the process of minimal computing. The main constraint in these scenarios is time. My classmates (and myself) first make the decision of what is needed to complete their project. Then, we need to decide what to prioritize in order to complete the project on time. 

History and the Archive Response

In this week’s readings about history and the archives, similar themes emerge that contribute to my ongoing understanding of the Digital Humanities. Like data and maps, history and archives are not neutral. Rather they exist within systems of power and inequality. Additionally, they should not be stagnant preservations of the past. Rather, they should aim to be built through communities, embodied, and connect the past with the present.  

In Pan Dulce: Breaking Bread with the Past, Maria Cotera’s mention of generations really stood out to me. Three representational generations were present during the ethnographic interviews (veteranas, ‘daughter’, and students). Through traditions and oral histories, this archive went from something stagnant to something living and transitional, moving from the past and into the present. Johnson highlights the uses of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database such as school lesson plans and genealogical pursuits. The data became an open access resource, allowing students to connect with the history and communities to connect with their own identity and experience of the world. Christian-Anderson discusses Murkutu CMS that aims to center Indigenous communities’ ways of producing knowledge and values around access. They write about protocols, rules about access and use of knowledge, that can be written by the communities themselves. This aims to contrast the history of colonialist collection in which Indigenous communities are marginalized; made to seem savage and on the verge of extinction, and an object of the colonist’s expertise.  

The Possibly Impossible research project was a very interesting example of constructionist teaching practices. The students involved in this process actively built their understandings through exploration, with their teacher as a collaborator rather than an authority. This sense of ‘play’ is another recurring theme in my understanding of Digital Humanities. Through social media and email correspondence with historians and others in the field, students in the project made online and in person connections. This brought the lives of those they researched into the present, through memes and community.  

Gaelic Language Mapping

In 2019, I had the pleasure of studying abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland. While there, I studied Scots Gaelic Language and Culture.  

Scots Gaelic (Gadhlig) is considered to be critically endangered. While once the founding language of Scotland, Gaelic has undergone a significant decline in the last couple centuries. This is in part due to purposeful political efforts to push it into extinction. For example, the 1872 Education Act shifted the official language of formal education to English. Gaelic became associated with rural, poor, and less educated communities in areas such as the Highlands. This caused Gaelic to become a marginalized language associated with discriminated groups. 

However, in recent years, efforts have been made to increase appreciation, preservation, and learning of the Gaelic language. For example, Gaelic language returned to schools in 1985, the BBC now has a Gaelic language channel, and Gaelic is offered via Duolingo worldwide. Furthermore, the Bord na Gadhlig, “a public body responsible for promoting Gaelic development” (https://www.gaidhlig.scot/en/our-work/) was created in the early 2000s. 

For this mapping assignment, I aimed to visualize the effects of these valiant efforts to preserve and develop the Gaelic language. Through Ildefonso’s “Finding the Right Tools for Mapping”, I knew that Tableau would be the best choice for my skill level and mapping goals. Through the Scotland Census website (https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/), I was able to download the JSON file of Scotland’s Local Authority (LA) region boundaries as well as the csv files for Gaelic language data in both 2011 and 2019. First, I had to synthesize the Gaelic language data. Since Gaelic is a traditionally oral language, I wanted to sum the count of all Gaelic speakers (regardless of reading or writing capabilities) for each LA region. Additionally, I had to ensure that each LA region name matched those in the JSON file. Then, I was able to relate the two data files in Tableau and visualize, by color, the number of speakers in each region. What I found was a significant increase in total number of speakers in every region with numbers doubling in city centers such as Glasgow and Edinburgh.  

If I were to move forward with this project, I would love to include location pins with pop out windows of individual stories of native speakers. This would allow the viewer to understand the acquisition of the language and its connection to the real lives of Scottish people. Additionally, I would love to make more maps that show the diaspora of Scots and the hubs of Gaelic language around the world, specifically in Canada.  

Throughout this process, I thought often of Dr. Nelson’s presentation on “Critical Cartography”. I aimed to be accessible to those with colorblindness by making the color analysis a gradient scale. I also recognized that as the creator of the map, I was holding power to tell a narrative that is not mine. While this map can be interpreted to show a success in the attempt to bring back the Gaelic language, it only tells a small portion of the story. By omitting data from before 2011, the viewer may not understand the history of hostility and cultural oppression that led to the necessity of these attempts.  

Defining DH

In attempting to understand the definition of Digital Humanities through these six introductory texts, it is clear that one sentence just won’t do it. However, a few key themes emerge. Digital Humanities uses digital and technological tools to build upon, rework and create productions of knowledge. Central to the idea of Digital Humanities is a sense of open access, inclusivity, and community. Furthermore, Digital Humanities cannot be defined without the mention of responsibility, as a newer field, to social justice and the demarginalization of certain communities.  

Digital Humanities often includes building something new from existing data or knowledge as well as reworking the ways in which we approach and disseminate knowledge. Examples provided in the readings include mapping and other data visualizations, archives, virtual reality, and games. Lisa Spiro refers to a sense of play in the name of curiosity and experimentation. Digital Humanities also relies on the values of open access, inclusivity, and community. The use of open peer review processes, social media platforms such as twitter, and easily accessible archives allow for communication, collaboration, and the building of ideas. To this end, Digital Humanities is an organic field.  

There is a responsibility as a new field as well as field built on community for the Digital Humanities to always be morphing into something better and more informed. This not only includes the values of diversity and inclusion but also the awareness of whose voices may be marginalized and the scholarly standards that may be privileged. Digital Humanities also aims to contextualize technology and the digital tools in use. 

The Colored Conventions project showcases all the aforementioned themes. However, for my own understanding, it redefined the nature of building and the timeline of Digital Humanities. In the introduction to The Digital Black Atlantic, Josephs and Risam invoke Toni Morrison’s term of ‘rememory’ as a way of remembering that crucially links it to the present and the future. 

In The Colored Conventions, modern digital tools are used to share how technology was used by Black Americans throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to organize, fight for their rights, and express their experience. Rather than taking archaic information and plopping it into a digital space, it translates the technology used in the past into something new and accessible. For example, in the exhibit ‘Black Women’s Economic Power: Visualizing Domestic Spaces in the 1800s’, black women’s use of physical spaces and print advertisements to gain financial freedom is highlighted. This is done through the digital tools of interactive mapping and archiving.