Introduction to Omeka workshop

This week I participated in an online workshop that was an introduction to the platform Omeka. It was hosted by Maggie Schreiner and Tuka Al-Sahlani, who are GCDI Digital Fellows. They first described Omeka, which is a free content management system used for creating archival and digital databases for museums, libraries, and other arts institutions. The Omeka platform allows users to upload digital images, videos, audio, and PDF materials and to use its archival-standard organization system to build online collections. We began by exploring several digital archival and database projects that featured digitized documents, photos and images, video, and mapping, and discussed what we noticed about them. Next, we went into breakout rooms to work with other students, examining a project of our choosing more closely. Another student and I chose a project created for CUNY to preserve and exhibit materials relating to its history as a public university in NYC. We liked the site’s participatory structure and its comprehensive essays on CUNY’s history. We did feel it was very text heavy, though, and that it could be strengthened by incorporating audio and visual elements, especially audio of the oral histories and an interactive timeline of significant events that helped shape the CUNY system. Our last task was to digitally archive an object from a collection of materials about the Grad Center’s building, which had been the flagship department store B. Altman (which I remember and definitely visited). I was given an illustration of boys’ clothing from the 1914-15 catalogue. I uploaded the image to the practice Omeka site we were provided with and entered metadata to build an archival entry for it. Overall, the workshop was a great way to see how Omeka works and to understand what it can offer institutions, and I look forward to exploring Omeka further.

DH vs Chore Based Education

When my cousin’s first child was young, he told us that he and his wife would raise their children to be involved in what they were doing around the house. Instead of only play acting cooking, they’d give their kids a cutting board and some vegetables to cut to help with dinner. They’d include their kids rather than simply saying that they were too young. Therefore, by the time that they would be expected to do chores, they would know what they were doing, understand that they were helping, and know that they were encouraged to learn more about the practical tasks of the household. It wouldn’t be a chore so much as something that they were used to doing and knew that they could do.

This week’s readings reminded me of how much the typical American educational experience (focusing on K – 12 here) is a chore. Standardized or otherwise, we mostly teach our children to learn to take tests. Memorize this vocabulary, use these words not those, parrot the point of view I’ve given you, remember some dates and the names of a select few “important” people, etc. You can prove your understanding of the material through class discussion sure, but the bulk of your grade (whether you pass or fail) will depend upon tests and essays, in which you must convince me, the teacher, that you have understood what I told you in exactly the right way. Remember – use a number 2 pencil, make your mark heavy and dark, and don’t go outside the lines.

This approach stifles students’ desire to engage with the subject material. As commenter BMBOD annotated in Kalir and Dean’s Hypothes.is experiment: “If you approach knowledge as something coming from an authority, it is very hard to fathom being able to create it yourself, or talk back to it, even if those platforms exist” (25). As DeRosa would say, students become consumers rather than contributors of knowledge. This consumer identity is especially apt since these students are likely consuming this knowledge from the commercially produced textbooks that they are required to buy, in which one particular narrative in a particular field is commodified and proliferated.

Digital Humanities praxis seems to be the antithesis to this rote approach. Working with firsthand sources at their own discretion allows students to come to their own conclusions with history, literature, art, and other humanities. Open educational resources allow educators agency to build their own curricula rather than depend upon a textbook. Social media and blog assignments, as pointed out by Cordell, allow students to hone their writing in formats that they are guaranteed to use after their primary / secondary / higher educational career ends. Injecting these projects into the course plan would allow students to take agency over their own learning and engage more deeply with the subject material. For an ambitious example, DeRosa’s undergraduate Early American Literature class not only developed their own fledgling textbook, but were told that they were ideal candidates because they understood how undergraduates consumed information. Her students were guided and encouraged to produce their own material rather than taught to demur to a higher authority. They were brought into dialogue rather than taught to recite a monologue.

Working on digital humanities projects further breaks this proliferation of a single narrative by exposing students to multiple viewpoints. Instead of reading a synthesized, universal account of a specific time period, for example, students can learn the particular experiences of individuals. the students can be taught to, as Risam describes, “resist the fetishization of the other” and broaden their perspective.

Furthermore, through Digital Humanities projects, teachers can foster more productive dialogue and instill in their students a healthier relationship with failure. In the prominent American educational model, the teacher is the authority, and failure is to be avoided at all costs. However, in Digital Humanities, whether it’s due to technological (first tier) or human (second tier) error, failure is a part of the process. We learn and develop both our software and ourselves through failure, just as we do in life. Learning how to fix flaws in our code as well as in our own logic are essential to success, both in a digital project and in our personal growth. Furthermore, as Craxall and Jakacki point out, teachers cannot wait until they learn everything about Digital Humanities to step in front of a classroom. As DeRosa points out, disciplines have very short shelf lives – by the time you’ve mastered say, a new software, that software will have a new update that you will have to learn. This learning curve for teachers requires teachers and students to learn together to provide a richer experience.

Injecting Digital Humanities projects into primary / secondary education provides students with digital and informational literacy as well as the confidence to engage and effect change in their local communities without fear of failure.

Reading Blog Post

“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?

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?  

Reading Response #2

What follows is more a philosophical meandering on our readings on Social Media this week. As such, the pieces we read are not cited specifically, but rather inspired this loose discourse:

As a *geriatric* millennial, I gleefully transitioned from chat rooms, to Geocities pages, to AOL/ICQ chat rooms, and inevitably to MySpace. MySpace was your personal space to share anything and everything you would like about yourself. And we tended to overshare. This was the age of posting random thoughts, pictures of every meal, but also a way to legitimately keep up with friends and family. 

In retrospect the rapid-fire transitions from social media platform to platform have been relatively seamless until one takes the time to put the brakes on and look back. Facebook was like a MySpace plus, but quickly deteriorated towards pushing promoted materials (and of course misinformation). Instagram and Twitter were platforms we hopped on next, striving to recapture that “authenticity” increasingly lost. Instagram brought us back to images of our friends and families, and Twitter allowed for an open and international forum to share thoughts. Until- again, an inevitable slouch towards promoted content and a propensity for circulating misinformation. 

This breakneck change in how we consume, and now create media content also passed us by. Where I was once enthusiastic to share my thoughts and pictures from the latest social gathering, I have largely stopped. Like so many of us, I have friends who have been, or currently are micro-influencers whose social media presence began to take on a language of branding, marketing, and eventually, a least a little advertising. Besides my personal disinterest in being a known entity, the strain of continuing to come up with content to support your profile, and boost interaction and reach- tires me out just thinking of it. Not to mention the fear of generating the unintended ire not only of the public at large, but possibly by current and future employers. 

And to the question, of who owns this content? While the creator does have the power to ultimately remove their content and/or profile from these platforms, posts may have been captured by other means. Do we know if the platforms that hosted them truly delete their information? And where one wants to aggregate data from posts whether for commercial or academic purposes- where is the line drawn on who owns what? When is consent for use called for? Is embedding an individual post enough credit? What of scraping large amounts of data? And the logistics of getting informed consent, especially when using massive troves of data? Of course, the platforms themselves hold the bulk of these keys. 

We’ve known this, and we’ve known that each new platform that has the potential to be the next place to find our collective authenticity will inevitably by spoiled for the purpose of increasing revenue- but yet, we often stay on the ride perhaps a little too long- until eventually the ride naturally comes to an end, or some sort of brakes are suddenly pressed, allowing us the moment to finally reflect on the racetrack we find ourselves on, and will likely stay on. 

Text Mining Praxis: Gender and As You Like It. . . Or Maybe Not Quite

I entered this Praxis assignment with a goal: measure pronoun usage in at least one Shakespearean play. Why pronouns? I was curious to see how often characters reflected on each other using gendered pronouns. Furthermore, in my research, I found that pronouns were often used as stop words (filler words that are removed before mining – think “the”, “an”, “a”, etc), which made me curious about how much these overlooked words could tell. Why Shakespeare? His plays are easy to find as public domain text files, the plots are well known, several have interesting gender dynamics, and. . . I was in a Shakespeare company in my undergrad years. I figured for new tools I may as well retread familiar territory.

I settled on As You Like It as this play particularly plays with gender – an exiled daughter of a duke disguises herself as a man who then offers to play the role of a woman (herself, no less) to help her love interest cope with his inability to see her. It makes more sense in context. With a woman as the main character, and one whose gender presentation changes throughout the play, I felt that As You Like It would serve as a good test case.

Next, came which software to use. I wound up trying a few, each of which will receive its own section:

Voyant

I started with Voyant, which was definitely the easiest to use. I copied and pasted the link from MIT’s webpage of the script (https://shakespeare.mit.edu/asyoulikeit/full.html) and clicked Reveal.

Immediately, I saw this Cirrus map of the most common words:

The script has 22,817 total words and 3,267 unique word forms according to Voyant with the top five words being Rosalind (the main character), Orlando (her love interest), Celia (Rosalind’s cousin / best friend), love, and good. I scrolled through the most popular words, trying to select both pronouns and gendered terms, but realized that this would be far too manual to be efficient. I then tried searching for pronouns before realizing that this was essentially using the Find function on the original webpage, which also didn’t seem like the best use of the tool. Interestingly, the context tab does show what precedes and follows the term. Unfortunately, the terms only show up when you use the regex term ending in an asterisk, so you do have to filter through words that start with the pronoun (i.e. she -> shepherd). It’s fascinating and provides some additional information, but doesn’t always refer to whom the pronoun is referring. Overall it was a fascinating starting point, but didn’t really answer my question

Google Ngram (Aside)

I pulled up Google Ngram to see if it would help. Considering that it shows how often words appear in a large selection of text, it did not help with my original question. I did want to share however, that out of curiosity, I searched for the term “themself” (single reflexive form of they) as proof of it being a legitimate pronoun / using singular “they” has historical validation. The result? From 1800 – 2022, we see a spike for “themself” usage in the most recent years, which seems to affirm the narrative that singular “they” is a more recent trend.

However, if you were to expand the search to texts from 1500 – 2022, the modern usage pales in comparison to its usage throughout the 16th century. Did this answer my question either? No, but I did find this to be an informative aside.

{L}exos

The last software that I tried was {L}exos, a data cleaning and analysis software from Wheaton College. My original MIT link resulted in unwanted HTML that I couldn’t scrub, so I downloaded a text file of the script from Project Gutenberg and trimmed the front matter (title, Dramatis Personae, and scene list) and end matter (terms of use). Then, I went to the scrub function and tried to: make all text lowercase to avoid case sensitivity, remove digits, and remove punctuation but keep apostrophes. I had to replace the roman numerals for Act and Scene numbers with digits so that I wouldn’t get an improper count of “I”‘s in the text. I attempted to remove all words but pronouns and character names, but the result wasn’t as revealing as I’d hoped. Fascinating, but not revealing. Then, I took out a number of the stop words (i.e. the, an, a, that, enter, exit) to attempt to get a more comprehensive look at word frequency, resulting in this word cloud:

From this cloud, we can see that the first and second person are the most popular, but I still wanted more information. So, I went into the Content Analysis tab and entered text file dictionaries for each pronoun type I was looking for: first person, second person, third person masculine, third person feminine, they pronouns, and themself (out of curiosity). For second person, I included both forms of you and thou. I then selected all of the dictionaries and hit analyze. {L}exos generated a table of how many times each pronoun type occurred – first was first person, then second, then third person masculine, then third person feminine, then they pronouns (sadly, no record of themself).

Interestingly, in As You Like It, the most popular feminine pronoun is “her”, which was used 81 times, as opposed to the most popular pronouns for first person – I: 503 times, second person – you: 422 times, third person masculine – he: 180 times, and they – they: 48 times. “She” occurred in the text 46 times.

Conclusion

Did I (eventually) answer my original question? Yes, thanks to {L}exos, I was eventually able to find out the exact number of times pronouns appeared in As You Like It. Am I surprised that the amount of feminine pronouns was significantly less than first person, second person, or third person masculine? Not entirely – since a play involves characters either monologuing their inner thoughts or speaking with each other, I’m not surprised that first and second person pronouns had such high representation. The fact that the masculine pronouns occurred at roughly three times the amount of feminine pronouns was surprising – though the characters are mostly men, the lead is a woman, and there is quite a lot of pining at the center of this plot. The fact that the most popular feminine pronoun was the objective her rather than the nominative she was in fact surprising.

However, while I was able to find some information, my next step is to dig deeper into whom the pronouns were referring. Is it neat to know how often different pronouns occur and compare them? Sure. Is there a lot of context missing that would make this study even richer? Absolutely. In the future, I’d like to do a web scrape of the script to find who is speaking when each pronoun occurs and at what time so I can go back into the text and analyze who is being referred to. Is Rosalind (/ Ganymede, her male alter ego) referred to more with feminine pronouns or masculine pronouns? How often are each character referred to by pronouns? Do any characters have any interesting balance of pronoun types (i.e. does Jaques have more objective pronouns used toward him than nominative)? I had originally selected As You Like It for its gender subversion. While I answered my literal original question, I feel somewhat unsatisfied in the lack of answer toward the spirit behind my original question.

Praxis: Text Mining

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.

I had some “fun” looking at mentions of Palestine pre-1948 in Nebraska newspapers:

Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]), 08 Jan. 1911. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
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.