April 2018 – Approaching the Digital Humanities

AFFECT RESEARCH IN THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Posted by

Natasha Ochshorn on April 30, 2018

When I began research for this bibliography, I was hoping to find explicit discussions on users affectual responses to technology, especially new technologies, and how those should or should not be considered when doing digital humanities projects. I was not able to find much in that meta-theoretical area, which could absolutely be due to my research skills, but may be indicative of an under-explored area of the field.

What I was able to find were accounts of specific digital humanities projects or research that either used or discussed affect as part of their work. There was also less in this area than I was hoping for, although I suspect that there may be scholars who are actually looking at affect, but are using different words, or directories that are not always including it in the metadata, which makes it difficult to search for without looking through every single digital humanities project.

I was interested by many of the articles that I found, and genuinely excited about a few, and so I’m choosing to be excited about an area of entanglement that is rife with possibility for the future, instead of being frustrated by the lack or difficulty of what is currently available.

Buiani, Roberta. “Performing the Web: Negotiating Affect and Online Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, Jan. 2014, p. 23699. Crossref, doi:10.3402/jac.v6.23699.

Buiani examines the work of The Sandbox Project, an art collective which aimed to have an online space that would not only act as a catalogue of the physical work done during “labs” or live interactive performance/art events, but that would function as an extension of that space where the digital projects would compliment and enhance the physical ones. Buiani investigates the difficulties of this project, including the lengthy time commitments required by digital projects, the feeling of “distance” from their audience that some artists felt in an online space, and the difficulty of translating affect from a physical space into a digital one. Buiani looks at affect both as an artistic preoccupation and a community based one, especially since the goals of the project were always intended to be as political as they were artistic.

The website for The Sandbox Project has become a static archive, and while Buiani explores all the reasons, logistical and otherwise, why that came to be she is most curious about whether artists and users pre-existing ideas about internet spaces created too much rigidity to make effective use of their website. “It follows that only a shift of perspective in what “online content” means in relation to the “lived world” might liberate the Sandbox project from it’s own impasse” (13). Although they were not ultimately able to achieve what they wanted to with their digital project, the experiment raises a lot of interesting questions about digital and physical performance spaces.

Cocciolo, Anthony, and Debbie Rabina. “Does Place Affect User Engagement and Understanding?” Journal of Documentation, vol. 69, no. 1, 2013, pp. 98-120. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/docview/1268758130?accountid=7287, doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/10.1108/00220411311295342.

A case study of an educational mobile app, GeoStoryteller, which gives interactive educational guided tours of New York City, focusing on a specific historical story (such as German immigrants). The app uses cellphone technology to give the users videos, stories, and historical facts as they become physically present in a space. The idea was to see whether or not being physically present in a space enhanced or aided the learning process for the users. After testing, the researchers (who wrote the article and developed the app) were satisfied that being physically present in a space does enhance historical learning. While the article doesn’t discuss affect directly, the questions the researchers are asking are ones that are concerned with the affectual responses of users of a digital humanities project. The user responses that they were the most pleased with were the ones where the user not only felt like they had come away with some kind of “knowledge,” but with an emotional experience directly connected to the use of the technology.

Deng, Liqiong, and Marshall Scott Poole. “Affect in Web Interfaces: A Study of the Impacts of Web Page Visual Complexity and Order.” MIS Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 4, 2010, pp. 711–730. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25750702.

I included this article as an example of the type of academic writing concerning web affect that I came across most frequently: authors concerned with web marketing and web design for consumer use. This article is specifically interested in affectual responses to order and complexity on websites. It’s a highly technical analysis measuring users emotional responses (specifically “pleasure” and “arousal”) to different amounts of visual complexity in web design. The study found that users responded positively to a complex visual design, even more than a strictly efficient functional one, and that those feelings would carry on as they went further “in” to their website use. While this has potentially interesting humanities applications, the goal with this study is obviously purely commercial and consumer driven.

Graefer, A. (2016), “Reading” Through the Skin: Lady Gaga’s Online Representation and Affective Meaning‐Making. J Pop Cult, 49: 522-540. doi:10.1111/jpcu.12424

Graefer uses this article to do a highly personal affective reading of celebrity gossip blogs; specifically looking at articles about pop singer Lady Gaga. She is particularly interested in the concept of “skin”, taken from various media scholars, the idea that our relationship to any visual media is a tactile one and affective one, and not just a conversation between a recording eye and a processing brain. Graefer believes the concept of skin is especially useful for discussing affect and online media, because it’s a media whose pace and gaze we control through our touch, via a mouse or trackpad. This creates a responsiveness that can create specific affective responses. She is concerned not only how these gossip websites look, but how they make her feel.

I would be interested to see this kind of thought and analysis extended to digital humanities projects; to consider not only how to best represent information digitally, or look for information digitally, but how digital humanities projects can play with or replicate the affectual experience of the text that they’re analyzing.

Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth “An Inventory of Shimmers”. The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg, and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cunygc/detail.action?docID=1172305.

The beautiful introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Gregg and Seigworth outline how they understand affect theory as it stood at the time of their writing it, as well as what they believe to be the potentiality of the theory. They do not discuss the digital humanities by name in this introduction, but several of the eight “regions of investigation” that they lay out are areas that intersect if not completely entwined with digital humanities work (7). Most specifically, the sixth region, “that can be seen in various (often humanities-related) attempts to turn away from the much-heralded “linguistic turn” “ which calls up images of Moretti’s distance reading, amongst other foundational digital humanities texts. This is a thorough, and wonderfully written tour around the ideas that affect theory embraces.

Landsberg, Alison. “Theorizing Affective Engagement in the Historical Film.” Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. Columbia UP, 2015. MLA International Bibliography, https://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/N2812963610/MLA?u=cuny_gradctr&sid=MLA&xid=980396cb. Accessed 29 Apr. 2018.

At the beginning of this chapter, Landsberg lists common critiques of historical films, all of which have also been lobbied against Digital Humanities projects. “That it inevitably “dumbs down” historical events, reduces the complexity of the past, and lacks the rigor of written history” (27). Landsberg uses the concept of affect to combat these claims, expanding on the work of Robert Rosenstone who posited that the formal elements of a move could make up “another kind of data,” that was as valuable as traditional historical research. “Like Rosenstone,” Landsberg writes, “I do not mean to dismiss written history or the purposes it serves but rather to suggest the specific power of a sensuous, experimental medium such as film to disseminate alternative but no less instructive forms of knowledge about the past” (29). Landsberg sees affect as a key tool in understanding the capacity of historical film as “another data”. She views the affective responses viewers have to historical cinema not only as engagement, or identification, but as a mode of knowledge through which they can come to have new understanding about history.

Losh, Elizabeth, et al. “Putting the Human Back into the Digital Humanities: Feminism, Generosity, and Mess.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis; London, 2016, pp. 92–103. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.13.

This article works as a good state of the field report of feminist movements in the digital humanities in 2016. The authors discuss the work of collective FemTechNet, amongst other scholars addressing feminist concerns in the digital humanities. They assert that there needs to be a refocusing on not only overtly gendered modes of discourse, but to also embrace modes such as affect, embodiment, and critical “mess,” which tend to be queer/feminine modalities even when they aren’t specifically gendered.

Nowviski, Bethany. “What Do Girls Dig?” Debates in the Digital Humanities Created April 7^th, 2011. Accessed April 29^th 2018. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/1

Sparked by a conversation on twitter, (the article is written using Storify, which allows users to archive and order tweets into a narrative), Nowviski dives into the possible reasons why women are a scare presence in textual data mining. One of the reasons she thinks likely, and which she states is true for herself, is the rhetorical language used around data mining, which makes it appear very tech heavy, and not in line with the more “interpretive” forms of digital humanities that interests her. She widens the scope of this question to invite a larger conversation about how the rhetorical language we use may be inadvertently causing gender disparities in certain parts of digital humanities study.

Oppermann, Matthias. “Digital Storytelling and American Studies: Critical Trajectories from the Emotional to the Epistemological.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 7, no. 2, 2008, pp. 171-187. MLA International Bibliography, https://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/N2812682908/MLA?u=cuny_gradctr&sid=MLA&xid=9906690e. Accessed 29 Apr. 2018.

In this article, Oppermann defines an affective dimension of learning as “their own voice and opinion”, them referring to students (177). He believes that digital storytelling, multi-media personal/historical storytelling projects, can be a way to combine affective and cognitive (outside stories and facts) learning in a way where the dimensions enrich one another. By positioning their own personal stories in the same context as the historical or cultural areas that they are studying, Oppermann believes students can see the academic conversation more clearly, and feel more empowered to become a part of it.

Rice, Jeff. “Folksono(Me).” JAC, vol. 28, no. 1/2, 2008, pp. 181–208. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20866831.

Rice begins this article by introducing Bob Dylan’s famous turn to electric instrumentation at the Newport Folk Festival as a framing device through which to look at the ways in which rhetorical categorization and pedagogy has embraced or rejected digitalization. When Dylan shifted from acoustic to electric instruments and still called it folk, while also widening the lyrical scope of what topics folk music could include, Rice argues that he created an affective experience (one that folds in the enraged audience reaction, and the sheer power of the music he played) which shifted the category of “folk” to include new definitions. The shift in the humanities and pedagogy to digitalization, he argues, is similarly using affective experience to not create new categories, but to enable a widening or shift of categorization.

The fold of affect into taxonomy is a method called Folksonomy. It includes open tagging systems (bookmarks, or hashtags), and lets users categorize things based on their own intuition instead of by a premarkated system. Rice combines this idea with digital technologies that allow for a combination of written/audio/visual mediums to create a new form of rhetorical writing that he calls Folksono(me), where the author is placed centrally within a remixed and highly personally referenced set of categorizations.

Uncategorized

Traffic: My Bibliography

Posted by

Daryl Lucas on April 26, 2018

All in all, I am using these articles to discern how and what can be used within the digital humanities to support some of the work I am doing towards my thesis project on eugenics.

After this week’s class, I wouldn’t mind more in the area of infrastructure studies because I think that has some bearing on my project.

Liu, Alan. “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” pmla vol. 128, no. 2, 2013, pp. 409-423.

In general, my interest is in the tools and methods used by digital humanities scholars in the consideration of a small digital project for my thesis. Alan Liu evaluates a particular digital humanities project and attempts to locate it within the humanities overall. It is useful as an example of a clear practice with a specific set of tools and methods used in an attempt to answer a clearly drawn out question. Liu emphasizes the importance of meaning, and this is essential in understanding eugenics. Besides counting and determining a number of texts and associated documents that circulated in the early formation of eugenic ideology, eugenics had a significant meaning that made it accessible. Can digital humanities techniques or methodology help discover correlations of meaning among the large volume of eugenic periodicals, pamphlets, and newspaper articles that circulated? Liu’s review of one particular DH project inspired me and helped see potential in using DH research methods. Of particular interest was what Liu calls Heuser and Le-Khac’ “methodological self-awareness” (411). While they are looking at word use, I am interested in the variety of lexical expressions related to positive and negative eugenics and their persuasive force and longevity. Teleology.

Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Routledge, 2002.

Like Rita Felski, Karl Popper looks at the “logic,” or procedures, and the limits of the methods used to assess experimental results and progressive steps involved in scientific discovery and why they matter in the pursuit of justified true belief. He also examines the limit of scientific examination of new discoveries. Popper has some chapters on the usefulness of simplicity in modeling empirical data, which is relevant in DH. There is also an important chapter on falsification, which seems to integral to improving the certainty and verifiability of observable phenomena. In thinking about the comparisons of “objective” science, I think an overview of the scientific method is pertinent to maintaining a methodological awareness. Since there are some within the digital humanities who liken the use of computation to objectivity and scientific exploration, I found Popper’s Logic useful in discerning the validity of some of those claims. Tautological and teleological

Hayles, N. Katherine. How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Hayles’ chapters on “hyper reading” and attention/distraction and by other means and “technogenesis,” the way society and emerging technologies relate to one another are essential to exploring the significance of relying on machines to complete computation that lie outside of our abilities. People think individually and socially. How do technological advancements influence human cognitive? Can this be a good analogy for the advancement of eugenic thought? Teleological

Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly. Vol 5, 1, 2011, pp. 1-20.

“The map is not the territory.” Yet the critiques that emerge from some DH work believes that the intention and design of models is a direct one-to-one representation. Drucker makes a number of claims I think are based in some misconceptions about the uses of models in science and what humanists borrow from them. She makes some valid points if these claims are indeed true, and it seems like each one must be investigated. In Daniela Bailer-Jones chapter from Scientific Models, as well as in Richard Jean So’s article “All Models are Wrong,” it clear that models are necessary for helping scientists and humanists revise their thinking and re-evaluate their data sets. There are folks who put too much stock in statistical models, but I think these folks are not the designers or users of these models. She makes very good points to adjust models to accommodate dynamic data sets. Tautological

Putnam, Hilary. “The Meaning of “Meaning.” Language, Mind, and Knowledge, edited by Keith Gunderson, University of Minnesota Press, 1975, pp. 131-193.

Wallack, Jessica Seddon, and Ramesh Srinivasan. “Local-global: Reconciling mismatched ontologies in development information systems.” System Sciences, 2009. HICSS’09. 42nd Hawaii International Conference on. IEEE, 2009.

This article focuses on how administrator and local communities describe and report information representing their interests, concerns, and context differ. Wallack and Srinivasan explore the specific incongruities in the information systems designed by a local community in India and the state agency responsible for some of the public works in that area. They claim that there is “information loss” that occurs when the state agency collects information from the local community using its state apparatus and fundamental understanding of what information is relevant. The idea of information loss as a result of the difference between the two information systems seems significant when considering the use of digital archives and databases to preserve indigenous knowledge. It is a useful way to consider how the Eugenics Records Office collected and interpreted the information it received and collected and what information was lost or never considered. The Eugenics Records Office’s information was archived. Is the archive serviceable as instructive of the errors related to its set of premises, or is it keeping it alive?

Cushman, E. C. (2013). “Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the digital Archive.” College English, vol. 76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 115-135.

Cushman explains the use of a digital archive as a pedagogical tool for language learners and/or as a means of mediating new interpretations of knowledge production. The Cherokee Nation commissioned the creation and the hosting of a digital archive of Cherokee stories in the Cherokee language. It is part of an immersion program, and it supports “the curriculum of the K-6 Cherokee immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, as one facet of larger language perseverance efforts” (115). She addresses the Cherokee stories and songs section of the digital archive as a means of decolonizing literacy practices by centering around the social practices and linguistic structures inherent and specific to Cherokee and Sequoyan, the syllabary of the Cherokee language. The use of the archive here as a means of preservation seems feasible, and it is highlights the importance of the Cherokee language speakers and cultural stakeholders assist in the design of the archive and privileging Cherokee, Sequoyan, and other culturally important works. Again, this work is instructive in reconceptualizing databases and archives as pedagogical tools.

Christie, Michael J. “Computer databases and Aboriginal knowledge.” Learning communities: International journal of learning in social contexts Vol. 1, 2004, pp. 4-12.

This article problematizes the use of databases to preserve indigenous knowledge. Specifically, it comes to the conclusion that the structure and organization of databases are incompatible with what knowledge is and how it is shared. In the introduction, Christie makes it clear that this exploration was inspired by concerns voiced by an older generation concern a younger generation’s attitude towards traditional knowledge, “Many Aboriginal parents and grandparents, concerned that the younger generation are not growing up with a strong indigenous knowledge/identity, endorse the use of computer databases to store texts, photos, videos, maps, lists etc to help with their work of teaching.” As Christie points out strongly and immediately, “Databases do not contain knowledge, they contain information (ie ones and zeros in particular formation).” The purpose the Yolngu Aboriginal people have in mind is education, so Christie examines the potential of databases being a part of the discursive practices of literacy as explained by James Paul Gee. Christie also examines the specific aspects of Yolngu Aboriginal people’s culture that could be potentially compatible with databases and their internal structures. This idea is useful because perhaps the preservation of materials, especially historically and culturally specific ones, needs to be framed in a similar manner so that they are instructive rather than a display.

Gentner, Dedre and Arthur B. Markman. “Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity.” American Psychologist, vol. 52, no. 1, Jan. 1997, pp. 45-56.

The use of analogy is important to knowledge construction. Gentner uses the example of Kepler and his approximations of the influence of gravity through analogy, which are based on his observations of the motion of the planets. Examining the nature of analogy and similarity can provide insight into how to possibly code, TEI, and create semantic text mining programs that can identify analogy and similar, which are often themselves models within scientific controversy. I think this clarification can offer some help in designing tools that search with greater precision. How does a better understanding fundamental structure of language help create more precise tools?

Huijnen, Pim, et. al. “A Digital Humanities Approach to the History of Science: Eugenics revisited in hidden debates by means of semantic text mining.” Workshops at the International Conference on Social Informatics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013.

This is useful for my specific thesis project. It is an example of what semantic text mining and various graphical representations can yield for the history of science subjects. One of my primary questions has to do with eugenics and US culture, in particular, seemed to be susceptible to eugenic thinking. Certain materials and methods remain the same. It also was very clear about how the methods were used to produce a particular result. “Digital history is a methodological approach framed by the capacities of these digital tools to make, define, query, and annotate associations and analyze long-term patterns of economic, technological and cultural change.” Their techniques seemed pretty comprehensive, and they employed large databases of material and a very dynamic system to get results (2).

Bailer-Jones, Daniela M. “Scientific Models.” Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, pp. 1-20.

The discussion of scientific models is useful in discerning the difference in approaches to models in the sciences and those in the digital humanities. There are places where the approaches approach similarity and are compatible; there are other places where there are controversy and contention within the digital humanities.

Mohr, John W., and Petko Bogdanov. “Introduction—Topic models: What they are and why they matter.” Poetics. vol. 41, 2013, pp. 545-569.

Wong, Shun Ha Sylvia, and Peter Hancox. “An Investigation into the use of Argument Structure and Lexical Mapping Theory for Machine Translation.” Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 12, 1998, pp. 334-339.

Holyoak, Keith J. and Dušan Stamenković. “Metaphor Comprehension: A Critical Review of Theories and Evidence.” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 08, 2018.

Catrambone, Richard. “The Effects of Surface and Structural Feature Matches on the Access of Story Analogs.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 28, no. 2, Mar. 2002, pp. 318-334.

Yang, Tze-I., Andrew J. Torget, and Rada Mihalcea. “Topic modeling on historical newspapers.” Proceedings of the 5th ACL-HLT Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011.

Tangherlini, Timothy R., and Peter Leonard. “Trawling in the Sea of the Great Unread: Sub-corpus topic modeling and Humanities research.” Poetics vol. 41, no. 6, 2013, pp. 725-749.

Uncategorized

Jamaican Revolution and Mapping Article

Posted by

Param Ajmera on April 11, 2018

Hello all! Here’s the link to the article in Social Text by Vincent Brown that I had mentioned in class yesterday – Vincent Brown; Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualizing Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery. Social Text 1 December 2015; 33 (4 (125)): 134–141. doi: https://doi-org.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/10.1215/01642472-3315826

An excerpt from his article –

Fortunately, there has lately been a spatial, even a cartographic emphasis in humanistic and social scientific study that encourages scholars to think more explicitly about how we can represent changing spatial linkages without reverting to the traditional geographic divisions. New historical cartographies allow us to visualize the networks and circuits that define spatial history, which the historian Richard White has succinctly characterized as the study of movements (of people, plants, animals, goods, and information) over time. With movement, interaction, and transformation, patterns are made and remade. By tracing these patterns, historical analysts can develop a visual language that may recover and illustrate spatial practices and processes. This is a thematic historical cartography, seen less as a technoscientifc form of observation than as a rhetorical practice that can defne, clarify, and advocate visions of the world that might otherwise go unarticulated. Cartographic visualization can be, says White, a fundamental part of historians’ analytical process: a means of doing research, generating questions, and revealing historical relations. New techniques present novel opportunities, but they also highlight the limitations of the archival material they employ.

His map can be found at revolt.axismaps.com

Uncategorized

Praxis – Mapping Geographies of Self

Posted by

Jesse Rice-Evans (she/they) on April 10, 2018

For this praxis assignment, I chose to work with Google Maps. I am already experienced with the platform, and the other suggested mapping softwares seemed intimidating on top of the abundance of other stuff I had to do over the past two weeks, so Maps was a perfect choice. I’ve actually been working on mapping locations where I work on my new writing project: a collection of autotheoretical short prose essays on chronic pain and embodiment. This project gave me the actual push I’ve needed to digitalization my lo-fi mapping (writing down lists of places I work in my phone).

As I develop notes towards my dissertation, I am embracing the role my own body plays in my writing and reading practices more and more. It seems silly to write about embodiment in any sort of abstracted way since the body is the thing doing the work of writing and theorizing. The weirdness appears in figuring out the relationships between and among the body and disembodied sites of writing and practice, like digital spaces. This mapping gave me a needed opportunity to start tracing a visual-spatial trail of how I move through 3D geographies while contributing to my ongoing move towards digitalizing my notes in readable forms.

Since I was stuck an extra day in Chicago, I decided to add locations where I had been on email, writing, reading, doing homework assignments, or otherwise “laboring” while in town. (This is also maybe revelatory of my reframing of “work” to shake off a long time on shift schedules, and to provide evidence that being an adjunct/“funded” graduate student means *never not working*.) Next, I’m adding layers of commuting and travel maps to make visible my movement around the city by car and train and walking—I haven’t yet figured out how to express that which choice I make depends largely upon my health at that moment, or anticipating my health later in the day.

Maps doesn’t make it easy to input actual circuitous routes, as it automatically adjusts the routes to highlight the fastest way from point to point, which isn’t actually always the way we went. That aside, though, I like this feature, and I know of accessibility scholars who have taken up adding notes of locations of curb cuts and other accessibility markers.

I also tried to implement this mapping strategy across my home state of North Carolina, which I visit about once a year, but the much larger scale made mapping less effective:

I’d like to figure out more intuitive ways to trace movement, but I do appreciate that I could demarcate each location with a customized icon and color. I don’t really understand why my own maps aren’t integrated with my use of the Google Maps app, but I’m also iffy about all my data being used everywhere!

Uncategorized

Mapping the route of “A streetcar named Desire”

Posted by

clararamazzotti on April 10, 2018

For this assignments I looked at the different tools offered to find what could be more “user-friendly”, and unfortunately I have Linux so I had some problem with Google Earth and the Tour Builder tool that I wanted to use. For this reason I chose ArcGIS.

I just spend some days in New Orleans so my idea was to try to understand the real route of a streetcar, and the most famous streetcar ever in that city is the William’s one.

Tennessee Williams lived in New Orleans for several years, and for this reason he decided to write about it, as he recognized in NOLA his “spiritual town”. The William’s house was (or better to say IS, you could visit if you want) in the French Quarter, at 1014 Dumaine Street.

The mapping: first of all, “Desire” is the name of a street where the streetcar did its route, so actually this should enter in the itinerary. The Desire Line ran from 1920 to 1948. It ran down Royal, through the Quarter, to Desire Street in the Bywater district, and back up to Canal.So the characters in the play took a streetcar named Desire, transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields Avenue on its way to Canal Street (I checked with the RTA website: http://www.norta.com/Maps-Schedules/System-Map/Line.aspx?ID=10836).

I put images on the map but PROBLEM: I’m not able to see them (in my mind their visualization was the same as on Google Maps when they pop-up at the mouse’s passage) and I didn’t understand how to use them properly in this map and PROBLEM II: I’d like to create a more complex and detailed map, but at the end I created something too simple.

Link to the The map

I could do the same with more effort using literary guide books (as I have about my city, Milan, in Italy) but it really needs time and great attention to details, and maybe a real visit on the streets.

During this assignments I was thinking to The Lord of the Rings: we could create an imaginary itinerary about all the books that talks about travels and discovery, also if they are not in a real world? I found this: http://lotrproject.com/map/#zoom=3&lat=-1315.5&lon=1500&layers=BTTTTT.

Uncategorized

Praxis Assignment – Mapping the East India Company’s First Voyage

Posted by

Param Ajmera on April 10, 2018

Using the StoryMapJS tool developed by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, I created a map [https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/7ed69da1bf32f9f828bf6a8fc34ddb7e/the-east-india-companys-first-voyage/index.html] charting the East India Company’s (EIC) first trading voyage. The StoryMapsJS interface is very intuitive and can be picked up with ease. The challenge, however, lies in being able to make sense of the EIC’s papers, given the style that it is written in and largely forgotten place names that it uses. For this map, I used a company record titled “A true and large discourse of the voyage of the whole fleete of ships set forth the 20. of Aprill 1601. by the Gouernours and assistants of the East Indian marchants in London, to the East Indies Wherein is set downe the order and manner of their trafficke, the discription of the countries, the nature of the people and their language, with the names of all the men dead in the voyage,” which I sourced from the EEBO database. As is suggested by the title, this record is written in more or less chronological order and details the major locations where the EIC fleet stopped, the names and ways in which various sailors / officers died in the voyage, the nature of storms encountered, descriptions of landscape and communities, as well as other moments of interest in the journey. My method for mapping this journey was to read the primary source, focus in on the place names that it mentions, and then plot them on my StoryMapJS in the order that it appears in the text. With each location that I plotted, I added a little snippet from the record that mentioned the place. In doing so, I hoped to import some of the historical language and context from the primary source into the digital map.

As I reflect on what I learnt through this exercise, I realize that mapping provides a very specific mode of inquiry that relies on a great deal of inference from the primary source. Despite the suggestions invoked by the neat lines drawn on my StoryMapJS, the exact path of the EIC’s voyage will not be revealed by just focusing on the places that they visited because the record is rife with mentions of being tossed and turned in tempestous seas. Moreover, the subjective experience of the journey with its storms, sickness, and failed mutinies is lost when pursuing a purely cartographic approach to this voyage. What is gained through this process, however, is a head-on confrontation with the constitutive imprecisions in historical texts describing journeys and the limits of digital mapping. Whereas the digital map needs a location, an exact point or series of points that can be placed on the map, the historical sources often simply mention vague details, such as being four degrees below the equator or seven leagues from the shore. How do we balance the imprecise information that we have with the clarity required of our digital tools? Does the necessity of digital mapping to require definite coordinates actually come in the way of working with older materials that do not have this data? I dealt with this hurdle by simply skipping all the locations that I couldn’t figure out. Hardly the best approach, but workable given the context of this exercise.

Uncategorized

Making Maps

Posted by

Daryl Lucas on April 8, 2018

Hello!

I’m coming down from a little bit of frustration with a couple of the programs designed to build maps. My computer know-how is an asymptote towards “skilled.” I am constantly being met with some technical frustration.

Tonight, around 6pm, I started messing around with Google Earth and Google Maps. It seemed to simple; it looked as if Google had removed some the features I remember. At some point, a user could upload photos to particular spots. This could still be the case, but I also could not envision figuring out post directions.

As I was messing around with Google Maps and Google Earth, I looked at ARCGIS StoryMaps and CartoDB. CartoDB looks like it is for commercial projects for anyone looking to open a store somewhere, which is interesting. However, I could’ve have spent the same amount of time that I just spent figuring out how to use the features of the website that I just spent trying to figure out how to simply add a picture to ARCGIS StoryMaps (ASM). Needless to say, I think I need help with these things. Tonight, I made the wrong choice and went to PhotoBucket since the feature of the ASM that allowed me to upload pictures, add a narrative tag about the books I wanted to map and a location, requested a URL with a file name like .jpg or something at the end of it. I am very unfamiliar with this, so I spent some time in Picasa and Google Photos and eventually PhotoBucket, which kept crashing my browser because of all the advertisements. And it still didn’t work.

So I went back to Google Maps.

I wanted to illustrate the movement of Gunner Kaufman, the anatognist of The White Boy Shuffle. Right now, as I am typing this, I see lines of code. Hopefully, this turns into an “embedded map.” If not, I have added an incredibly simple map in the hyperlink.

My experience leads me to wonder a couple of things: Who has time for all of this problem solving when there are books to be read (not to mention homework assignments)? There is a huge gap between understanding the name of something and what it is supposed to do and how to get that thing to do it. A couple of the articles from my bibliography (that I will eventually post to the blog) touch on databases and indigenous knowledge and how compatible such things are. There narrative map as well as the literal spatial can be better adapted to a globe and maybe 10 minutes of storytelling. In the Yolngu Aboriginal people of North East Arnhemland, there traditions and artefacts are closely associated with place. Building maps into a database may assist with making the numerous connections between site and ancestry and the stories of individuals and parental lineages tied to language and dance, but there may be significant information loss and also technically difficult.

Monthly Archives

AFFECT RESEARCH IN THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Traffic: My Bibliography

Jamaican Revolution and Mapping Article

Praxis – Mapping Geographies of Self

Mapping the route of “A streetcar named Desire”

Praxis Assignment – Mapping the East India Company’s First Voyage

Making Maps