Since I work closely with the Administration of Child Services (ACS), I wanted to use NYC Open Data and look at payroll data before and after covid 19. What I found was a data file titled

Citywide Payroll Data (Fiscal Year).I filtered the data to show ACS data for the 5 boroughs from 2019-2022. The 3 visualizations are overtime hours, median and average pay, and median pay by title description. Other filters included Pay Basis is Annual only, excluding hourly pay basis.

I decided to use Tableau because it is a common program used at my place of work. I was pleasantly surprised by how little experience is needed to navigate the program, and it was fairly simple to select and compare different types of visualizations for the data.

After reading “Against Cleaning”, I wanted to use the data as is and see what it can show. Although I didn’t start with the idea to investigate over time hours the visualization “Median Paid Over Time Hours” showed a significant dip of hours across all boroughs during covid 19. The interesting part of this visualization shows Manhattan, with close to 0 over time hours paid across all 4 years.

A challenge with my visualizations were adding labels to the boroughs as side from the key. A viewer would need to hover or select the key to distinguish boroughs on two of the visualizations. I was unable to publish my visualizations to be public, as of now the publication can viewed by other tableau users.

Tableau – Visualizations

When looking at a map, it is taken as fact. The lines representing borders, the name of the place being mapped take as sovereign, the peoples within those boundaries are clumped together in one location, and time stands still. The video in Visualizing Sovereignty and Critical Cartography provided a new take on mapping, it brought time & Sovereignty into picture, and it placed maps not on paper, static picture, but in motion. A map is another form of data, and therefore also “capta”, it holds subjectivity and power. A map just like data, should not be taken as fact, but as a perspective, and through the readings we learn, many common maps hold a motive.

A strong interest of mine, is the Black history of my mom’s native country Colombia. Colombia has the second largest black population in South America, second to Brazil, with 11 million Afro-Colombians making up 26% of the population. Cartagena, Colombia was the first Spanish colony and the biggest Spanish slave port in South America. Currently Cali, Colombia is the largest black city in the country. Many Colombians on the coast will call themselves or their cities “Caribe” (Caribbean). In Visualizing Sovereignty, Colombia was very briefly mentioned as a part of the Caribbean, but not included in the video mapping Caribbean sovereignty. In the discussion of maps, sovereignty, history, is it possible to Map the black history of Colombia through music and sound?

In last week’s class, many projects sparked my interest in the possibility of Mapping Sound. I found Cathy’s presentation on SONG DATA, a 2018 Project from Ottawa quite interesting. Music can be seen as a universal language and experience. Cathy mentioned her own experience of seeing successful women of color dominate many musical genres and was shocked to see the music industry data presented in the project. Melissa, in presenting HERSORY, touched upon audio preservation, the importance but also dangers in preservation work. Rabana in discussing ensalved.org, honed in on her user experience, the color, the interactive timeline, the data. But also, the ability to filter through places, events, and people. The website was able to bring a connection the stories and even included handwritten letters. SONGDATA demonstrates the importance of highlight disparities in music, HERSTORY the preservation of sound and how audio is also a part of telling history, and ensalved.org the interactive collection of  enslaved history & data. When I think about the musical and salve history of Colombia many aspects of the projects mentioned come to mind.

Finding similar projects to Mapping Colombian Music also proved its challenges, many websites touch upon the black musical history in Colombia and using sound to represent a place or people in Colombia, but a map that encapsulates both was hard to come by.

Musical connections between Africa and Colombia: The “Caribbeanization” of Afrobeat in Colombia (africasacountry.com)

A place of resistance, solidarity, and locality: Soundscapes of Colombia (arcgis.com)

A sense of space through sound: A Guided Tour Of Colombian Music, From The Mountains To The Coasts: Alt.Latino : NPR

Mapping Rhythms: Ritmos musiccales de Colombia by sergio cabrera on Prezi

I am very eager to learn how a project in Mapping Music in Colombia could come to fruition. Some of the challenges I faced while attempting this week’s praxis was lack of open-sourced data on music by region and finding reliable sources on the origins of Colombian sound. To end, a song that encapsulates the intersections of Black History and resistance, Colombian Music and the migration of sound is Joe Arroyo — La rebelión | Letra/Lyrics | English translation (“The Rebellion”).

The readings on Why Data Needs Feminism and Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display have many overlapping themes. Graphical Display argues the limits and skewing of data to present an outcome or serve a purpose. Data should be seen as “capta”, in simple terms, subjective. One way to do that, and to push forward the argument in Graphical Display is to view Data under a feminist lens. In Why Data Needs Feminism, authors briefly touch upon the inherent erasure of human experience in data, how data can remove complexities, as mentioned in Graphical Display. However, Data Needs Feminism argues “Data are part of the problem, to be sure. But they are also part of the solution.”

Reading Graphical Design was a great segway to Data Needs Feminism, Graphical Design highlights the consensus of the general public of data taken as fact, but argues “Data are capta, taken not given, constructed as an interpretation of the phenomenal world, not inherent in it.” So what interpretations of the world can we make using Data? How can we use those interpretations to advocate for ourselves and others? Does Data take new forms, with a humanist lens? Data Needs Feminism is one of many examples on using Data to not just be in interpretation of racism and sexism, but to display the intersectionality of discrimination based on race and sex. Data Needs Feminism does not shy away of the critiques of data, by referring to Data as a tool to consolidate power over lives. A quote that embodies the consolidation of power: “The process of converting life experience into data always necessarily entails a reduction of that experience—along with the historical and conceptual burdens of the term.”

Data Needs Feminism not only highlights the drawbacks of Data, similar to Graphical Design, but also lifts up the triumphs. In the case of Christine Mann Darden, the complex relationship between Data and lived experience comes into play. The way data not only validating Darden experience of workplace discrimination but gave her and colleagues the ability to advocate on a larger scale. In a sense, propelling an individual truth to a larger scale, a scale those with power could no longer ignore. Does this story, like many others, insinuate data is needed to validate lived experience? How can data shift and morph, from points on graph to pictures in a digital gallery, with feminism or more broadly a humanist approach?

“Information is not a commodity to be controlled but a social good to be shared and reused.” – Lisa Spiro

If I could center an understanding of DH around a project, it would be “This is Why We Fight” by Lisa Spiro. Throughout the readings, the following questions arose: where the digital begins in the humanities discipline, how does it change the scholarship regarding humanities, who constitutes a “digital humanist” and what skills does a digital humanist have that an academic in humanities does not?

In “This Is Why We Fight,” the message that comes across is that instead of defining concretely between digital humanities and humanities, the values can be seen as one and the same. Preservation, diversity, equity, promoting the free exchange and exploration of ideas all encompass DH. The values in traditional humanities of access to knowledge, intellectual freedom, and the democratic sharing of ideas holds true in DH, the difference is in translating these values from print to digital. Spiro notes the wisdom of the crowd, which builds, expands and reconfigures knowledge, this is a key difference between DH and humanities, were ownership of knowledge is clearly defined and controlled by academics in traditional humanities. Within DH the lines of ownership are blurred to create a free-flowing exchange of knowledge.