Personal Reflection – Week 3

I can’t believe we are already on week 3. Our Feminist Markup Project started with great momentum. Our project manager already sent us materials to get started on learning TEI/XML. Plus we also started to discuss the implications on using a tree hierarchical structure to classify the profiles of female directors that are embedded in complex networks of intertextuality and collaborations due to the nature of their creative job. It’s looking like a very exciting challenge. And I’m super appreciative of the clarity, great organizational skills and eloquence of our Project Manager and team members. We also distributed roles but will collaborate in doing the metadata coordination, which means we all going to get our hands dirty in those XML files, as our first milestone. That also made me reflect how the project is not just a Markup venture but also a digital pedagogy project. I appreciated when Miaoling pointed out that (from our readings) how this groups of tech developers from the start just recruit and assume that all their members know the necessary skillsets to create a tool or digital project. Although I do understand that our current academic world is very compartmentalized and segregated; and of course any discipline under this circumstances needs to develop a team of experts to go deep into their craft. At the same time I do think technological development needs to burst the bubble a little and include into their projects people with no skillset and train them. Simply, because what they do affect all of us and keeping the knowledge locked by just integrating those who already know about how something gets created is another mechanism to reproduce structural inequalities. Plus, the fact that only teams of experts define the terms and categories and the code that goes into creating a tool, is what seals and validates their episteme in the first place. On the other hand, I’m very interested about the agile culture and the scrum methodology. Would love to learn more. After listening to my classmates I realized that maybe is not that there’s no reflection while doing the creation process. But, rather, that the reflection  occurs in a different temporality than, say, when we write a paper. As our classmate explained, this reflection maybe occurs after a number of small cycles have passed. Would love to hear more about it and why they deem it valuable as a process of creating things in the world. Finally, I want to bring two things that I found so valuable form classmates. The first one, regarding the project plan we will deliver next week, I absolutely loved when someone said “I would be really grateful if I didn’t have to hide uncertainties”. So well put. So true. And also, something that was discussed for our own group process. If we are going to create a Feminist Markup Project we need to know that we are defining the scope of the project but not the scope of the lives of the female directors. Many of them are alive!! And that just made me think so many hurdles. Like, does a given tag, say, <<location>>, builds a prison box to define an artist that is still producing films. Does it literally <<mark>> that person in a given time and place with no change. I guess people review every so often  XML files to update them to a current situation. Because, what about if that given director does not want to associate anymore with the <<location>> tag we created. What if they don’t want to follow the nationalistic logic? what if a “country” does not express their belonging to a place? For example, if we were classifying female directors in Colombia, given our history, I would certainly know that there’s a huge difference between directors born in any city, as opposed to being born in the Pacific or Atlantic coast. There are important historical, cultural and social reasons to differentiate between national and regional location or even other kinds of locations, but for a dataset, do those differences create too much of a mess?. Plus one can also change their mind along life and not belong to any place or multiple places, what if we define location by our migrant stories. But this is all so very exciting because Miaoling remind us constantly that this is an experiment, we can define multiple tags and the lab notes will be super helpful to create an archeology of this kinds of decisions.

Last week I recruited three amazing members to join me in making the Feminist Markup project. We have confirmed our communication methods, preferred meeting times, and ways to manage documents/track progresses. In addition, I have contacted Dr. Laird for available data and the final delivery methods. She and I both believe the lab notes could be submitted to the JWD site as public available essays. This probably could answer the question I received last week about participants’ footprints and credits.

We had a great start, but I also noticed that there would be a big challenge to design a mechanism working under the gaps between the hierarchical trees of XML and scalar definitions of gender and feminism. I am also in Dr. Lisa Rhody’s Feminist Text Analysis course this semester. Our discussion on the scalar and fluid definitions of gender this past Monday in class inspired me a lot. This structural question also exists in ways we do the intertextual encoding. As for directors’ profiles, the intertextuality question could also be seen in networks, influences, co-workers, etc. I will work with my team to read Intertextual Encoding in the Writing of Women’s Literary History.

I also prepared materials for XML-TEI training for the group:

XML/TEI in Five Minutes

CMU DH Literacy Guidebook Elisa Beshero-Bondar How to grow data forests with XML trees

Digital Scholarly Editions: Manuscripts, Texts and TEI 

A very good one I refer to often: https://tei-c.org/Vault/Tutorials/mueller-main.htm

TEI by Example

We are going to design a schedule today to learn and practice XML and write lab entries to record our questions and solutions.

Regarding team management, I went through One Week One Tool recourses and was motivated and inspired by their management models and personal reflections. The readings lead me to the questions: 1. How does our team record our failures and successes and improve the project from our lab notes?  How could we define failures or non-significant results? 2. How to balance our team roles with members’ different available time during the semester?

I appreciated the readings assigned this week – it was a great way to learn and pre-reflect from the experiences of those who’ve embarked on similar journeys to the one we are starting. Reading the reflections from OWOT made me realize the importance of journaling throughout this semester with regards to our own projects. Be it for ourselves or for others, we partake in a process of reflective knowledge sharing when we journal about our experiences. Our journals can serve as a point of entry for others who join the Digital Humanities community in the future. I find it incredibly comforting and beautiful to be part of something that extends beyond myself.

I’ve been thinking a lot about More Than Surviving in the past week. I’m honored that Majel has invited others into a project that is so personal. After class last week, I couldn’t find the proper words to say how excited I am to be working on this project alongside Majel, Estefany, and Elizabeth. I’m hopeful that my past experiences with creating interactive map visualizations will be useful in our project, and that I can be proactive about using prior lessons learned to inform the long-term technical design and data infrastructure of More Than Surviving.

This past week, our group has emailed about communication preferences and roles. I’m looking forward to ironing out details for a revised group project proposal in class tomorrow!

Since our class last week, I’ve been reflecting on the responsibility that comes with signing on to a project designed by someone else, especially one as meaningful as Majel’s. It’s intimidating, especially this early on in my DH studies — I know that the point of this class is learning by doing, but it still feels strange to embark on a project like this knowing that I don’t yet have all the technical skills needed to pull my part off.

It’s not quite time to get into the technical details yet, so I’ve been focusing on gaining background knowledge. The bit of reading I’ve done this week — a book chapter Majel sent us on enslavement of Indigenous people in colonial New England, some background information on the Mashpee and Aquinnah tribes, some documents in the research folders Majel has already pulled together — has made me even more aware of how little I learned about Indigenous history in school, and how biased and deliberately narrow the education I did get was. This excerpt from a Smithsonian article about efforts to change the way American schools teach Native history aligns with my own experience:

Most students across the United States don’t get comprehensive, thoughtful or even accurate education in Native American history and culture. A 2015 study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that 87 percent of content taught about Native Americans includes only pre-1900 context. And 27 states did not name an individual Native American in their history standards. “When one looks at the larger picture painted by the quantitative data,” the study’s authors write, “it is easy to argue that the narrative of U.S. history is painfully one sided in its telling of the American narrative, especially with regard to Indigenous Peoples’ experiences.”

The linked study that mentions the lack of post-1900 content actually discusses how rare even post-1830s coverage is:

Few research studies, however, address the frequency and contexts of Indigenous Peoples’ histories, cultures, and current issues in U.S. history standards. First, Journell found that state standards halt their coverage of Indigenous cultures and histories after the implementation of forced relocation policies in the 1830s and prescribed “to a traditional version of history that identifies American Indians as victims and marginalizes them by failing to identify key individuals or examples of societal contributions”

It seems fitting that this project picks up where most state curriculum standards leave off, and that the focus on Wampanoag agency and activism deliberately counteracts the “traditional version of history” described here.  I’m excited to get started and to keep learning along the way.

Great start for a semester-long project!

Let me just express gratitude for the DH curriculum in GC. It is so practical, open!

With a lot of enthusiasm, I signed up for this class, and last week I decided to be part of Kristy’s project. I am captivated by the community-driven approach that goes with my primary goal of joining DH, i.e., the storytelling of the unheard, the outliers. To me, a zine is a space for creative storytelling that has a lot of room to grow.

Now comes the brainstorming! We had a fruitful meeting during the weekend. I am amazed by Kristy’s passion and knowledge of zines. We talked about different aspects of the projects, such as different forms of storytelling, visualization, doing multimodal analysis of Zine, focusing on the final output from this endeavor, making the website community-facing, i.e., allowing people to submit Zine, considering GC as a community to begin our experiment, and so on and so forth. There was a lot we brought to the table. We eventually decided to start with the GC community, and we are currently in contact with GC librarian Alycia Sellie, who has extensive experience in the field and is enthusiastic about Zine.

Here’s my thought! There are some questions that must be addressed.

1. Since Zine often has multimodal content, like a comic, can we interpret Zine to bring the creator’s story and emotions to light? We are still unsure whether we should ask for participants’ motivations behind their zine. We do not want to put a boundary on creative thinking.
2. Can I do any computational analysis for Zine? 2D shape analysis may be
3. How do I compress a zine during digitization to maintain maximum quality at the smallest possible size?
4. Can I build a dataset of zines to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to generate zines?
5. What is the best visualization of zines?
6. Can Turtle be used to draw digital zines with Python?

I would love to follow up!

I was excited (and relieved) coming out of the last class with the project assignment. I’d admit I was a bit nervous with how the project assignment was going to unfold, as there were so many unknowns (e.g., gap in skillset/ interest, feasibility of the projects, what if everybody voted for the same project or not enough people are signing up for each project). 
 
I found the skillset blog post extremely helpful to get a bird eye’s view of everyone’s skillset as well as interest. The project pitches were also great and helpful to think through the scope of each project. The project assignment exercise was also a useful mental exercise for me to think through which type of digital humanities projects I’m more drawn to, as well as techniques I want to develop. While I still don’t have a concrete idea about what my capstone project might be, it is helpful, nevertheless. 
 
I found the first and second round voting helpful as it first cut down the project list. It was just a lot of moving variables that introduced a lot of unknown in the beginning (many projects, many skillsets, many potential combinations of groups), cutting out some projects from first round voting and getting initial read on group was helpful on cutting down with the overwhelming information overload. I ended up being part of the project I was most interested in, which is wonderful. I had a make-or-break question around data acquisition that was addressed at the Q&A session.

Our group have already had a skeleton project scope, which I am looking forward to diving into tonight! Overall, I am looking forward to working on the project and seeing what will come out of it at the end of the semester!

As I’m thinking about the limits of visuals to render taste (a major theme of the project), here is a quick screen taste test. Perhaps it’s an example that disrupts the assumption that a visual can transmit taste accurately.

How do you absorb the visual above?

How does your relationship to it change when you read the description below?

“First, there’s a layer of ladyfingers, then a layer of jam, then custard, which I made from scratch, then raspberries, more ladyfingers, then beef sauteed with peas and onions, more custard, and then bananas, and then I just put some whipped cream on top!” (It’s the delicious trifle from the the TV show “Friends” )

Did the simple descriptive language get something across that the image couldn’t? Did it untangle the simultaneity of the image with (a small) dramatic and tasty effect?

OTHER TASTY PLACES

While further contemplating how we encounter the sense of taste in digital environments, I am searching for/thinking about on-screen examples that produce an experience of taste for me — or at least productive associations between visuals and taste & smell. 

Perhaps I am looking for ways to create unlikely synesthesia (= an automatic overlapping/joining of senses). Below is James Wannerton’s London tube map. He is a synesthete who intuitively associates geography/places with taste. I think the language on the map is sparse but descriptive (as opposed to evaluative which could be a scale of bad-tasting to good-tasting, e.g. ) and therefore more evocative.

LESS OUT THERE, MORE PRACTICAL

This week, at the very beginning of Overbaked&Underproofed I’ve mostly been thinking about how the proposal’s ideas, timelines, role-concepts map onto the reality of the semester. Now that we have a splendid team of three (Teddy, RC, me) and a concrete timeline, my lens on the project is shifting. Something I’d call “practicality mode” is kicking in. A mode that’s very different from the grant-focused mode. I prefer practicality mode.

As a group we still have to make some decisions about workflow & communication structure, but we’ve already collected possibilities. So far we have a shared google drive to collect relevant project info, and we have a doc that collects weekly questions. The questions encompass practical as well as conceptual issues. This week they’re everything from “Shall we use Trello?” to “What’s a good way to house and begin tagging this GBBS corpus?”

Wrangling the corpus will be the main focus of our first month, and it is an immensely exciting part of the endeavor. I think much of the project’s ultimate shape will be defined by what we get from the corpus. Teddy (!!!) found a published transcript of GBBS that will save us a ton of work and frees us up to think about additional ways of annotating the corpus. What else, other than evaluative judging language, might we want to track? Usage related to speaker? Shifts related to episode theme? How contestants of different language backgrounds absorb and reuse the GBBS language?…

Kicking off More Than Surviving brings up a lot of feelings for me. While fighting back the sensation that there will never be enough time to know all the things I need and want to know, I also feel the excitement of poking around and investigating what I can know. 

This project emerged as an expression of my complicated relationship with history. I’ve always prided myself with knowing exactly where I come from —The Wampanoag Nation. This “knowing” is embodied. There are many different ways to understand where you come from—what traditions your community/your family hold (the songs, the foods, the stories), the land you are connected to (the smell and shape of the trees, sound of the water), and then there is the other way—the facts, dates, historic events….data. So much of my culture that is empowering and has shaped my Indigenous identity is not held in data. The data always meant pain. The year our land was illegally incorporated, the year we went into war, the names of distant lands we were sent off to as slaves. I once had a history student demand upon finding out that I am Indigenous, “Do you know your history! You HAVE to know your history!” He said it with the assumption that I must know it because it is my responsibility to educate others. He said it without ever considering that he ought to know this history as well. As a non-Indigenous person I found it to be intrusive and oppressive—so many reactions arose in me: Who are you to demand that I know a history that has been intentionally erased from sight, yet you don’t acknowledge that erasure or the pain it carries? Who are you to demand that I know a history that you are surely only defining as data, or want me to translate for you into data? When I tried to share some small bit of our culture to shift him away from the fixation on data, he spoke over me… because that’s not the history he meant. 

This project is a kind of making peace and bringing together what I understand to be my people’s history and what I see the outside world insists is my people’s history. It’s bringing two sides together—the sensation of my belonging to a long line of self-determined people who know where they are from and what it means to be respectfully part of a larger world brought together with the data that somehow makes us real to the outside world. It’s also for members of my own community who may not have had the opportunity to touch on these pieces of our past. There’s no shame in this—intentionally oppressed communities have so much weight as it is to simply continue.  I chose to focus on our activism, because I believe such data points will contain the essence of what I’ve known to be true through my own understanding and experience of my culture—we are a loving people and we move with intention even through pain. 

This week has been an interesting balance of considering the practical pieces of producing a project like More Than Surviving, and having the tremendous feeling that comes when you are about to start a great wandering—one that you know will bring you even closer to your home. In truth, the practical pieces will be a great aid in keeping the full rush of information from overwhelming me, as I know I will discover a great many new things about myself and my ancestors in this process. I am extraordinarily thankful for Estefany, Elizabeth and Zelda who have come together to help build this, I know through them I will also learn so much about what is possible and gain even more balance by understanding their perspectives.

*Is this the right place to publish the personal blog?*

Dear No Frills Journal,

Unlike my previous posts, I will try to keep you concise and not too poetic nor academic.

Our last DH session was quite something, I enjoyed presenting and, despite the anxiety and the long preparation, I felt very supported by the class; listening to other students’ projects was also a great exercise! In the end, I would have happily joined any of the them as they were (and are) all equally fascinating and nicely challenging.  Ultimately, I joined Miaoling’s group with her Feminist Interventions: Designing Descriptive Markup for the Japanese Women Directors Project.

The group (Miaoling, Maria, and JP) has already exchanged a number of emails and messages discussing some vital points including the original project proposal, the preferred communication channel, and the setup of our first meeting. We have definitely started off on the right food! I won’t deny that I’m quite excited to get my hands dirty with the research piece and related XML encoding.

I think it could be a good idea to bring our group’s personal journal entries together and migrate them to a separate space, however, this might add extra work, so let’s see what the group decides during our first meeting.

Meanwhile, I checked out the resources listed on this site, last tab on the right, and wow! So much good stuff; the tutorial section is formidable and I believe it’ll become handy very soon.

I’m separately working on my capstone, which is currently feeling like a stranded vessel that passively, and inefficiently, occupies a lot of headspace that badly needs some clear up! Suggestions are welcome!

I’d say it’s pretty much it for the moment (less than 300 words yeyyy!) – cheers!