This Digital Humanities project is titled “The Digital ACS: Amplifying Community Stories” (The Digital ACS), this project stems from the lack of a collaborative, centralized, digital space for the NYC Child Welfare community. The project aims to answer the following: What can community voices and stories reveal about systemic racial biases within NYC Child Welfare? The project will explore the need for an interactive space for families affected by child welfare practices to share experiences, access resources, and advocate for systemic change, particularly in the context of disproportionate impacts on Black families. The project’s goals are to create a storytelling platform that amplifies these voices, collect community experience, foster community engagement and contribute to both social justice and the humanities.

The project proposal was an interactive way to apply the theories, methods, and best practices we learned throughout the semester. I walked into this semester without hearing of digital humanities, and now I feel capable and confident enough to be a participant.

I found this nice online DH toolkit that has helped me a lot in creating my workplan

Wireframing – Digital Humanities Toolkit

The Digital ACS: Amplifying Community Strength

This online platform is intended for Children, Youth & Families impacted by the NYC Child Welfare system looking to connect with other community members, share their experiences, and browse for local resources, groups, and archival related media.

The goal of the platform is to create a digital communal space for Children Youth & Families that will

1. A blogging site (would that be the best word?)
2. An Archive of the published content and past content on other platforms
3. A heat map to visualize the conversations as they come in and locate the already present online media

The “blogging” platform would include:

1. Have the ability to post and comment/ react, like a blog, from people within the community
2. Include a tagging feature for content. The tags will serve as a tool for browsing through conversations and categorizing content.
3. Reactionary button to capture the audience approval/disapproval (thinking of something like verifying the content in a sense)
4. Centralize and categorize stories published in major online media outlets from the past year in an easy-to-browse archive

The first phase of the project will focus on creating the blogging tool. The objectives of this phase are:

1. Create a code of conduct: Build trust with our audience by communicating data transparency
2. Establish clear web design, accessibility, and navigation
3. Develop and Test the platform
4. Create partnerships with stakeholders to promote platform

Importance:

There are many stories of families and their experiences within Child Welfare, however these stories are scattered all across the web. In the first phase the platform would provide a digital space for the community to share insights, resources, and stories. In additional phases the project would create a bridge between current families and past families of the system, by establishing an archive of past media and news articles, and lastly it will work towards visualizing the many stories, resources, and media of the New York City families impacted by Child Welfare, past & present, on a heat map.

The tools & resources that will be used are:

WordPress: Digital Platform

Plug in: DH Press

Canva: for preliminary web design

https://prezi.com/view/X4SF8sjkatiXcU7PA8iF

I attended the Mapping in QGIS via zoom this week. I mentioned earlier in the semester that taking an online course via dhrift.org, can be an alternative to attending in person workshops. I think I was biased on how well that workshop went, the in person experience really allowed me to glide through the online instructions. This workshop there was a bit of a lag on following the steps on github. Offering Mapping in QGIS in person would be great, it would allow participants to ask quick questions about correctly downloading, and jumping back on track after a wrong click. With 2 hours on zoom, I do believe 2 hours in person we could have gotten into more tricks on the tool. But overall, the workshop was very beginner friendly, from downloading the tool to opening and importing the data, it was very click and drop like other tools we were exposed to during this semester.

I would recommend the workshop, the 2 hours went by so quick because each step of the way you’re learning how to use the tool, but given the time to go at your own pace. What I liked most was the question posed to get us thinking about what data we would need to get us started. It allowed the group to think about a question/a project first, and the group offered insight on the best places to find the information you’re looking for. I would urge for a in person session, but via zoom I learned a bunch I didn’t know before.

Instructions to download QGIS:

1. Visit the QGIS download page: [QGIS Download]

2. Choose the installer for your system:  

   – PC users: Download the 3.4 version compatible with your Windows system.  

   – Mac users:Download the 3.4 macOS version compatible with your operating system.  

Resources for Data:

https://gss.norc.org/us/en/gss/get-the-data.html

https://www.kaggle.com

https://www.pewresearch.org

Github, step by step instructions: mapping/sections/1basic.md at master · GC-DRI/mapping · GitHub

I’ll update and share the slides once received.

#workshops #mapping #tools #qgis

Although a short reading, “Public, First” is impacting the way I am thinking about my project. Digital and public aren’t interchangeable in humanities, you may have a digital project that can potentially “other” the public or community your project is intended for and/or about. This made me look at my project, how I want to center the project as a tool and resource for children & families that need guidance to navigate the Administration of Child Services. Although, I wanted to provide an immediate remedy during high stress situations (like run-ins with law enforcement), after reading “Public, First” the service-driven approach spoke to me, my values, and what I want to contribute to this community. I would like to include the shared authority approach, to invite to others to contribute to the project especially audiences outside of academia, as highlighted in the reading. What started as a mapping project, one method to demonstrate space, may turn into a project that creates a space. A space to have the community in conversation with each other, share the resources they have used, and share their experiences that can in hand help others in similar situation. The reading has allowed me to reposition my project with, what I argue, a more community-centered approach.

This week’s readings is a great addition to last’ weeks discussion regarding our digital lives and younger generations take on ‘the digital’. Looking at how students aren’t inherently drawn to DH, may find to be more knowledgeable of the digital than teachers, and are accustomed to digital tools more so than older generations of students and teachers brought a piece to the conversation that we began to discuss last week. In discussing what’s in and out of DH and what DH actually is, it was refreshing to read Ryan Cordell’s take on how not to teach DH. Although, theories and definitions are important, in any discipline, speaking of the not so fond memory of undergrad studies, it is hard to draw connections between lengthy and complex definitions and meaningful present research and projects. A huge point in the reading was engagement, which essentially draws to the essence of DH in collaborative work. Teaching should emphasize hands-on projects and critical engagement with DH methods that naturally integrate digital tools, allowing students to see DH’s relevance without extensive theoretical framing. This importance of teaching is highlighted in the piece “What We Teach When We Teach DH” (Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki), how teachers of DH should encourage students to see themselves as active participants in knowledge production. To Cordell’s point to be active and engaged, not to see how well they know DH history and definitions. Both pieces touch on a flexible approach to teaching, Cordell with scaffolding and integrating, and Croxall and Jakacki with a collaborative approach. A flexible approach, Cordell argues helps demystify digital tools and encourages students to apply DH methods within their field of study organically, bringing them back to the foundational principles, definitions, and theories.

#teaching #pedagogy #collaborative #handson #engagement #students

“Access is a process of control rather than liberation” Unrembering the Forgotton Tim Sherratt

“But power over a platform requires knowledge of what it purveys. And where we collectively lack that information, we lose the capacity to steer creation’s course.” What’s on top of TIKTOK Tess Mcnulty

“Media doesn’t just record life; it shapes it, making mediated experiences central to social reality.” A Life in Lived Media Mark Deuze et all

“Truly democratic spaces allow knowledge to be shared without fear of repercussion or backlash.” Is Twitter Any Place for a [Black Academic] Lady Marcia Chatelain

This week’s readings were particularly powerful, it describes different facets of media, how its presented, how it can be analyzed, benefits and short comings of social media metadata and looking at media’s past present and future. The quotes above allowed me to rethink social media, how vast, powerful, useful, and elusive it can be. The readings that stood out to me the most was Chatelain’s and Mark Deuze et. All’s pieces. It was captivating to hear of the #syllabus movement in Is Twitter Any Place, how it connected scholars and teachers, current social uproar and the classroom, how political conversations are just as important on and offline. A Life in Lived Media, brough forward how important and all-encompassing media is in the current day, it’s not a tool but a part of daily living, a part of making sense to our culture and our worlds. All readings showed many topics we’ve touched upon this semester, creating accessible tools, sharing blocked or difficult to find knowledge, foster collaboration and conversation. Looking at different ways scholars use data of media platforms, for what purposes and what issues are they facing, is especially concerning. With the change in Twitter’s policy, and many other social media platforms it raises user anxieties, like what is being done with our data behind these closed doors? The data, like described in Life in Lived Media, is in the background, how can we understand what we consume if certain pieces of information are kept hidden?

I used Voyant to analyze the following online texts/sites:

The New York Public Library Digital Collections :Act Up New York Records

National Aids Memorial: History of the Quilt

New York City Aids Memorial : HIV/AIDS Timeline

Britannica: ACT UP article

Very easy to use and create visualizations such as cirrus, termsberry, word links, and word trends. It was fun to see similarities between texts and sites very quickly. I thought I would see certain words regarding race, sexuality, more healthcare terms like illness, drugs, certain medical professions, to be more common but wasn’t the case. Also, different entities, like the FDA, government bodies, maybe other activist groups to have come up as well. Furthermore, it was interesting to not see common names of people who were pivotal to the movement.

I was trying to see how I can link terms together, for example “new” and “york” to be linked as a phrase instead of individual words. In the termsberry, cirrus, and trends you see the words separately.

In all, I enjoyed using this tool very easy to add in more sites, to hover over the tools and see the information. I would say the tool is very useful, insightful, and efficient in producing the data.

While continuing to play with this tool, I saw the feature of scatterplot, in output you can select options of different unsupervised learning methods like document similarity, PCA Analysis, Component Analysis, and t-SNE. In the graph below you can see how close together points “new” and “york” are, going back to the point of using the phrase new york instead of individual words.

I’d like to center my project around resources for NYC families who are being investigated by law enforcement and may receive a visit from Child Protective Services (CPS).

Audience: Families looking for emergent resources when dealing with law enforcement/child protective services

Format: A map of the five boroughs that can include resources specifically for families in contact with CPS like

• Family Court Lawyers
• 24 Hour Shelters
• Family Rights Advocacy Groups

I like the format of Moving Home 2016 (arcgis.com). I’d like to be able to provide resources in the form of text and provide a map.

Reasoning for Project: Emergent unexpected run-ins with law enforcement may signal CPS to visit a family. I would like to create a platform that can put a family at ease from temporary relocation to what to expect from the initial CPS phone call/visit and what their rights are.

Additional Data: I’d like to research the relationship between NYPD and CPS:

• What type 911 responses are followed up by a visit from CPS
• Are certain families more likely to receive a visit
• How long is the gap between meeting with law enforcement and meeting with CPS
• How long does CPS remain involved

If possible, I’d like to include the current conversation to include CPS workers in non-emergent 911 call responses

• Is the city moving towards that type of response
• If not, what type of advocacy work is taking place to allow for that

The Guiding Science project and Chicana Por Mi Raiz are two more examples of Data Feminism. It is crucial to use this lens in creating archives to break away from the masculine lens of data collection. The Guiding Science project was interesting in the practice of failing, running into problems and documenting those issues for other researchers to see, interpret and potentially solve. In this nature, data collection becomes very collaborative even outside the scope of the initial staff on projects. What draws me to the project is not just the objective of documenting female authors and their contributions to scientific community, but also the effort to compile biographical information. This key point in the projects research shows a clear connection to Chicana Por Mi Raiz. Although the history and research methods differs from books and biographical information found online in Guiding Science to the collection of oral history via interviews in Chicana Por Mi Raiz, a stark similarity is the effort to recover the story and life of these two  groups of women and reclaiming their history.

The Guiding Science Project collects information on women posthumously. Since woman of that time faced many barriers and restraints to publize their work, about 40% of writers were difficult to track. Although, Chicana Por Mi Raiz does not face this issue, in Pan Dulce, a question was posed on how they would proceed with their archive once the women in the project have passed. Again, both projects are very different, but share a similar problem on working with a person’s data or ‘digital life’ in the physical after-life.

The Guiding Science Project is embracing the problem, allowing future researchers, scholars, and students to tackle the issue of missing data, documenting their process and preparing them to make mistakes. Dr. Maria Cotera states it is an issue that ‘keeps her up at night’ and is one of  the limitations of an autonomous projects.It will be interesting to see how Chicana Por Mi Raiz, navigates through this issue and how they will continue their collection for a digital life of Chicana History in the physical after life.