Author Archives: Melissa (Lis) McDonald

Final Project Proposal – TWINSIGHTS

When I initially thought about what I wanted my project to be I was interested in using text analysis tools to make a point about the way twin myths are perpetuated through literature. Once I started working on the project I realized this wasn’t really asking a question or adding anything to the field of digital humanities. I was aggrieved by twin portrayals in media and I wanted everyone to know it! Then, through a twin friend, I was connected to a couple of actresses who had been cast as twins in an upcoming play and they wanted to make sure they did the characters justice. This then got me thinking about the posts I usually scroll past on Reddit in r/Twins by writers asking for advice from twins on how to accurately portray their characters. As it turns out there is actually an interest in showing twins as they are! Two people who can (but not always) share a unique relationship and experience of the world. It was through this that TWINSIGHTS materialized.

There is a decent amount of content about twins online ranging from twin research studies, to blog posts, to social media accounts. When I first became interested in the psychology of twins in the late 2000s the content I was able to find was about behavioral psychology and what twins were able to tell us about nature vs nurture and humans in general. I soon found other books that were more focused on exploring the relationship between twins and their experiences of the world from twins themselves. Now with social media there are a lot of twinfluencers providing an inside look into twinship and capitalizing off of it in the meantime.

With all of this content circulating online and in books I thought it would be useful to create a resource/research hub for twin content. I would like to take some well known literature – Shakespeares Twelfth Night and Comedy of Errors, J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High series, and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and pull out the sections that portray the twins in the stories. I will contextualize these excerpts in the larger story, and then use content already available online that critiques the passage or create original content should commentary on the excerpt not already exist.

I think ultimately this project will be two phases. Phase 1 will consist of gathering and cleaning the data for the selected works, writing summaries for the works, obtaining permission from content creators, and creating original content where appropriate. Phase 2 will be the creation of the website/database itself. I would like to create a site with minimal computing principals in mind, but ultimately will defer to the designer/programmer based on their skills. At the end of the project I hope to have a website featuring 3-5 exhibits. Ideally the site could continue to grow with more works of literature being added, as well as adding in categories for movies and TV shows.

Reading Response – AI/Algorithmic Knowledge

Since our unit a few weeks ago on AI/Algorithmic Knowledge a couple of things have been stuck in my brain. Lauren Klein talked about using AI to take notes during doctors appointments that provide a summary at the end for the patients records. She talks about doctor burnout and how this would make their administrative tasks easier, giving them more time to actually practice medicine. This is clearly problem that needs to be addressed and AI could be the answer. I am already skeptical of AI chatbots/assistants, but I have serious concerns about who owns that AI and what kind of access they would have to medical records. What will happen when AI is able to have intimate knowledge of discussions between doctors and their patients? From a surveillance perspective this is a terrifying thought. Aside from the existential questions, Klein goes on to explain that the AI isn’t always accurate, it makes errors in word choice and even subs in different names for medicines. I guess more training in this environment could improve the AI, but what is the cost of that, both from a privacy perspective and the errors made in the training process?

This goes into the other thing I cannot stop thinking about, which is how AI is trained on large data sets. In The Atlas of AI Crawford gives a brief history about where IBM found training data sets in the 1970s for early AI – user manuals, children’s books, patents, and then ultimately an IBM lawsuit. She goes on to explain that the internet changed the scarcity problem with large data sets, suddenly there was plenty of freely available content in high quantities. Crawford describes the internet as a natural resource for AI (106). I now feel acutely aware of the ways my own data can be scraped from the internet and what it can be used for. The who, what, and why of this concerns me. I have come to accept that AI is inevitable. My wife consistently reminds me that it is here whether I like it or not. I think it can be used as a tool to make life easier, or I guess I think that’s what it should be used for. But, I do not trust the owners of these tech platforms and the way they can manipulate us using data they scrape from our online footprint. At this point it feels like the bad outweighs the good… is it possible for AI to exist only for “good” (and who decides what that means)? For it to only be a tool to make life easier (rather than the be all end all)?

Text Analysis Praxis Assignment

I chose to experiment with Voyant and word tree for the text analysis praxis. I wanted to find a text that I was familiar with so that I could at least kind of understand what I was looking at. I went to Project Gutenberg to see if I could find a text that was available that I was familiar with. I was excited to find The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Project Gutenberg is an awesome resource that I enjoyed exploring and hope to continue to use in the future.

The first tool I used was Voyant. I liked the various charts that this tool produced and the ease of viewing/playing with the different visualizations.

Voyant – The Well of Loneliness

I didn’t think it was all that illuminating to see that “like”, “little”, and “said” were among the most used words. I was also unsure of how to read or manipulate the data in any meaningful way based on the initial output. But, once I played around a little bit things got more interesting. I decided that I would look at the main characters love interests throughout the novel and compare that to instances of of the word “longing”. I wanted to use the words “longing”, “longed”, “lonely”, but I could not figure out how to make them all into one category. I think if I had played around with the tool more I would have been able to figure that out. Based on the data “longing” was the word in this cluster used the most throughout the book, so I chose to use that word for my analysis.

Briefly, the novel follows Stephen, a lesbian in early 20th century England. Collins is her tutor (childhood), Angela a friend who she has a relationship with (adolescent/early 20s), and then Mary who is arguably the love of her life (adulthood). I think it’s interesting that Stephen’s feelings of longing are heightened when she is in a relationship. In the novel Stephen is obviously queer, she wears “mens” clothes, doesn’t marry, does traditionally masculine activites, etc. Whether it’s a symptom of the time or genuine attraction, Stephen dates feminine women who are often betrothed to men (Angela) or they face discrimination/a harder life, which prompts Stephen to push them away and into the arms of a man (Mary). I think you could extrapolate that these factors influence her feelings of longing.

The other tool I explored for this praxis was word tree. I really liked the interface and how the user interacted with the text. It was useful to have the full quote highlighted on the side of the page, which I think would be really useful for performing close readings of texts. This tool also seemed to capture the overall themes of the novel better than the Voyant analysis. As a fun little treat the results also read like poetry to me.

word tree – The Well of Loneliness

Workshop: How Do You DH?

I attended a workshop called How Do You DH? that was kind of a “lunch and learn” session put on by two digital fellows on 10/7/24. I attended this session because I thought it would be helpful as I am thinking about our impending DH project proposals. I am most interested in text analysis so thus far I have been thinking of how I can do a project using that DH methodology. But, since I don’t know all that much about text analysis it has been hard to come up with a project idea. The workshop helped me to think about what research question(s) I might want to ask and then presented an array of potential DH tools to choose from in order to answer that question.

I appreciated the high level overview of DH , which was laid out really clearly and in a straightforward way. I am still struggling to conceptualize exactly what DH is and especially struggle when trying to explain it to the people in my life. The facilitators had us break into small groups to look at a DH project and assess what the format of the project was (Digital Methods Approach, Traditional Monograph + Digital Project Approach, or Wholly Digital Approach), what DH methodology was used, and what tools were used to create the project. Again, this just helped me to conceptualize what will go into my own DH project and also to better understand how DH is translated into the “real world”.

This was the first workshop I attended and I am eager to go to more!

Short Response to Weekly Readings – Melissa McDonald

I found this weeks reading/video assignments really illuminating (with the exception of How Maps Lie by Mark Monmonier, which strangely elicited a Math Tears response in me). Building on Drucker’s capta vs data it was striking to see all of the ways we take the “objectivity” of data for granted and how that is expressed in maps. I don’t think I was necessarily surprised, but I had never really thought of maps as subjective even though it now feels so obvious. I feel like this concept builds on much of what we’ve learned so far this semester – we need to be critical about what is presented as “fact” in all areas of digital humanities (and life?), who/what gets counted, how the different presentations of data can skew the interpretation.

Dr. Nelson’s talk “Critical Cartography” was especially illuminating considering the current conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. Maps have a huge influence on the way we see the world. The conversation around the borders of Gaza, the West Bank and settlements, and the borders of Israel are based on politics, not what is actually true (if there is a Truth when it comes to geographic borders…). I thought it was interesting to see the way Google maps is adapting their map to use dashed lines to mark contested boarders, which still doesn’t tell the whole story.

With Israel’s pink washing campaign I have had conversations with my brother in law about how I would be imprisoned/killed in Palestine (so how could I possibly support the Palestinian people), as if queer Palestinians do not exist (and as if states in our own country are not incredibly hostile towards queer and trans people). Something that was brought to my attention was the Queer Mapping Project, a community generated “counter-mapping” platform used to digitally archive LGBTQIA+ experiences in relation to physical space. There are fewer entries in Gaza compared to other places on the map (though I do not think this is reflective of the queer population there), which is something that I think should be examined more (barriers to access). Additionally, some entries are posts in solidarity rather than experiences of queerness in Gaza. This can be kind of confusing/skew the “data”/capta. Even with it’s limitations this map is a useful tool in telling us what isn’t accounted for in mainstream narratives that are fed to us in the west. https://www.queeringthemap.com/

Lesbian Herstory Archives Audio/Visual Collections Project Analysis

http://herstories.prattinfoschool.nyc/omeka/

The Lesbian Herstory Archives is a volunteer organization that is collectively run and located in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The contents of the archives are varied and come from all over the globe with the goal to document the widest range of lesbian experience from all geographic, cultural, political, and economic backgrounds. The archives are huge, apparently one of the oldest and largest archives dedicated to lesbian history with more than 10,000 volumes, 1,400 periodicals, 12,000 photographs, 500 pulp novels, and many collections of original manuscripts and person archival material. Their website hosts a calendar that gives times for researchers and visitors to come by. I would say on average the archives are open approximately 10 hours per week. The Archive is in a nondescript brownstone on a quiet street in Park Slope. Inside there are rooms filled with books, tapes, personal collections of t-shirts, boxes and boxes of interviews, etc. From personal experience it can be a little overwhelming – where to start, what to look at. Given the fairly limited times the archive is open, one wouldn’t want to waste precious research time digging through stacks to find relevant material. This is where the LHA Audio Visual Collections come in.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives Audio Visual Collections project aims to categorize and digitize a variety of audio visual formats and make them publicly available. The LHA Audio Visual Archive has digitized over 385 hours of content, mostly from the 1970s and into the 1980s. I think the very nature of the project, digitizing archival material, so that a larger audience can access it makes this a digital humanities project. Prior to digitization these tapes and collections remain accessible to a small number of people. Of the values laid out by Lisa Spiro in her essay “This is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities – openness, collaboration, collegiality and connectedness, diversity, and experimentation – this project touches most obviously on openness and collaboration.

Openness – this project meets this value in DH because it is taking something that is physically walled off (though accessible should you be in the NYC area and have a way to get to the archive at a time when it is open) and making it available to a wider audience via the internet. I think this is one of the major strengths of this project. Even if I was able to go to the Archives and listen to the tapes while sitting at one of the tables there, it would take so much time and effort to sift through the tapes, listen to the content, and then decide which tapes were relevant to my project. The LHA Audio/Visual Collection digital archive makes the tapes easy to explore and allows researchers to sort through the material in a cohesive and organized way.

Collaboration – this project is worked on by those from the Pratt Institute School of Information (Professor Anthony Cocciolo and students). The work between the students and professor and volunteers at the archive (who are bringing in varied experiences themselves) make this project collaborative. My sister actually volunteered at the archives around 2012 and was responsible for cataloging tapes in the archives extensive collection. She told me she would listen to the tapes, write a summary of what they were about, and other important information. I wondered if she worked on any of these digitizations, but she could not remember.

The authors of this project converted the VHS tapes, U-Matic tapes, 1/4 inch open-reel tape, and compact audio cassettes into .wav preservation files and uploaded them to the digital archive as .mp3. I think the tools were chosen based on the subject matter. A quick google informed me that .wav files are used by archives for audio preservation because the audio file doesn’t go through any sort of compression (uncompressed), so the audio quality remains the same.

This is an ongoing project, adding 20-30 newly digitized items a year. I would love to see this project go on forever, but I worry the amount of time, energy, technical and financial resources associated with maintaining and building this project could be cumbersome and at some point could lead the site/project to be abandoned. I think this is a larger issue that has been touched on in our class readings that I am curious to learn more about. Additionally, I think that at some point we won’t have the technology to listen to the tapes. For example the authors noted that finding reliable equipment for the U-Matic tapes was challenging because the format is “endangered”. I am all but certain this will only continue to be a problem in the future with VHS, cassette tapes, etc.

*edited to add link to project website

M. McDonald – Blog Post #1

The definition of Digital Humanities feels hard to pin down, perhaps this is by design. Prior to doing the reading I would have defined DH as using digital tools to analyze data (texts, media, etc.) within the humanities in order to assist in a research project. After doing this weeks reading I think the definition is much broader and more nuanced than that. I found the “Big Tent” characterization of DH apt as it captures the varying components of what DH is and reminded me of the limitations of such concepts (if something is anything then what can it really be?). My initial understanding limited the scope of digital humanities to its function in a traditional academic research project. The readings opened up a much broader possibility that DH can be a harbinger of change not only in academia, but also the world. It would be a waste for DH to be limited to traditional research projects. This is obvious with Torn Apart / Separados. Vol I and II combine what feels like an impossible amount of data into an easy-to-use and understand interactive interface. This sites impact goes far beyond the academy and showcases the potential for a more engaged, political Digital Humanities.

The definition of digital humanities is so encompassing that it seems it could be anything. I thought it was particularly useful when Ramsay stated the Digital Humanities “involved moving from reading and critiquing to building and making”. This is one of the most poignant part of the introductory reading for me. Something I find myself preoccupied with is how the past will be translated into the our digital present/future. Both The Colored Conventions Project and the Early Caribbean Digital Archive felt like looking at a museum exhibit. When I was an undergrad I had the opportunity to see the Riot Grrrl Zine Collection at NYU. I asked the archivist if they would make the zines accessible online and she said that they weren’t going to digitize them because it would go against the very ethos of zines (or something to that effect it was a long time ago). It’s dramatic given the content, but it felt like an injustice to keep these zines locked away in an archive where only a small number of people would ever see them. There must be a way to interact with these kinds of documents/artifacts in a digital space that doesn’t degrade the value of the object or the experience of viewing it. The CCP and ECDA show us this is possible.

Another defining characteristic of the Digital Humanities is access. Based on the assigned readings it is clear that DH practitioners are invested in pushing the field to be as ethical and accessible as possible. Many of the readings touched upon the ways the digital humanitarians are working to challenge inherent bias and intersecting identities. In The Digital Black Atlantic, Josephs and Risam note that they are de-centering whiteness by putting African diasporic communities and cultural production at the heart of their inquiry, which challenges the assumption that white, English speaking people from the “Global North” are “universal”. Wernimont and Losh also touch on this in Bodies of Information when they note that technologies are not neutral, they promote particular ethical and ideological values. In a DH That Matters, Gold and Klein argue that moving away from the “Big Tent” to viewing digital humanities as a set of vectors of inquiry that are defined by tensions, alignment, and oppositions is the future of the field. I am hopeful that this commitment from the digital humanities will bear out a better future that is truly interdisciplinary, diverse, and multifaceted.