Event Title

Soapbox Session A

Presenter Information

Patricia Carlton
Amardeep Singh
Ned Prutzer
Stephen Horrocks
Anita Chan
Ali Rachel Pearl
Chris Strasbaugh, Ohio State University
Dan Martin
Mary Lindsay Van Tine

Location

CB1-308

Start Date

4-11-2017 1:45 PM

End Date

4-11-2017 3:00 PM

Description

Filtering the Flow: Interrogating Digital Culture through Web Archiving (Patricia Carlton)

Our digital culture is characterized by flow - the seamless integration of multiple digital devices and platforms and uninterrupted access to humanly imperceptible amounts of information. Given the interdependence between our everyday life and our digital devices and digitally networked systems, digital cultural heritage encompasses the ephemera of these transactions. These artefacts include private and public websites, social media platforms, the hidden code and software algorithms generated by human and machine, and the personal devices that keep our society seamlessly connected to our digital lives. Cultural heritage and educational institutions preserve and present our cultural heritage, adapting traditional methods for selection and description.Yet, the traditional means for preserving and describing these cultural artefacts rarely include references to a website's embedded, isolated objects that might reveal economic and political hegemonic forces. I argue that re-examining the fields of metadata and conducting close and creative "readings" of the embedded and often hidden content embedded in websites illuminates the hidden hegemony. In my talk, I provide examples from the Library of Congress K-12 Web Archiving Project and suggest that the deconstruction of the web crawls and creation of augmented metadata not only helps create new information, but also provides a method for critically examining digital culture.

According to N.K. Hayles, David Beers, and Nigel Thrift, our society and culture has a highly developed "technological unconscious" – our cognitive and physiological adaptations to the rapid influx of information, reciprocated by software algorithms that record our inputs and shape our intake of information. Our cultural ethos of seamless connectivity and our desire for limitless information may blind us to hegemonic forces, whether these forces be fashioned by corporate capitalism or radical populism. Yet, as much as algorithms filter our information flow, we have both the ability and responsibility to generating new filters by adding metadata. Uploading digital content, whether sharing our videos as citizen journalists or annotating documents for cultural heritage institutions through crowdsourcing, are means by which the public creates information. When we include additional metadata to our content, we are essentially creating finding aids – an added filter to the information flow.

Creating digital content and adding metadata is not enough, however, to enlighten the public to hegemonic forces, let alone challenge them. Deconstruction of information and inventive rearrangement of web content may provide insights. In this discussion, I share my students' examination of embedded images, documents, and ads that populate their screens of information – Imperceptible or hidden content that becomes revealed in their web crawls. Studying the semiotics or cultural significance of the various artefacts certainly raises awareness of various marketing and political trends. This may be an initial step towards pausing the flow and altering the shape of our information. When guided by ethical principles and inspired by creativity (such as creating stories from the collected artefacts), the results of the web crawls may surprisingly challenge the hegemony of market-driven algorithms.

The Archive Gap: the Kiplings and their Indian Interlocutors (Amardeep Singh)

Various scholars have alluded to the ways in which digital archives of 19th century authors tend to favor canonical (white, male, Euro-American) authors over the voices of others. The discrepancy is partly a function of the historical record, but it is also the result of the choices digital humanists have made about what materials to include in their archives. I call the discrepancy between Euro-American dominant archives and archives focusing on the contributions of people of color and non-western authors the ""Archive Gap.""

Members of Rudyard Kipling's nuclear family lived in India for approximately thirty years (roughly 1870-1900), and all four Kiplings (Rudyard, Lockwood, Alice, and "Trix") published writing based on that experience. While their writing has been extremely influential in shaping how the rest of the world saw British India, as postcolonial readers of Rudyard's work in particular have often pointed out, their representation of life in the British Raj was highly ideological and often quite limited.

For that reason, my new digital thematic collection, "The Kiplings and India: A Collection of Writings from British India," has been designed to balance the presentation of digital editions of literary and journalistic texts by the Kiplings themselves with writing by contemporary Indian commentators and interlocutors. The project is being built in the Scalar platform, and I am using Scalar's in-built Visualization and Path frameworks to help users learn about a series of thematic debates in British Indian life: the famines, gender issues (especially around marriage law and the rights of Indian widows), and the advent of the Indian nationalist movement.

Innovation in the Global Midwest: Research and Pedagogy Across Regional Archives (Ned Prutzer, Stephen Horrocks and Anita Chan)

For as varied and diverse as innovation developments have been in the Midwest – with the region hosting the first computing-centered industrial district prior to the rise of Silicon Valley – existing literature in the social and historical studies of technology has placed relatively little emphasis on the region. In keeping with the theme of this year's HASTAC -- that explores "The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities – this proposal highlights a multi-sited collaboration that brings together scholars from across varied locales of the "global midwest"" -- the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University, and the University of Minnesota. These sites are brought together as a cross-disciplinary, multi-campus coordinated exploration into the Midwest's layered innovation histories that have often been overshadowed by innovation narratives focused on dominant regions and centers of computing (whether academic sites like MIT or Stanford, or regions like Silicon Valley and Massachusetts' Route 128). The Illinois research team's case studies, for instance, include early innovations in education technology and online distance education such as PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) and PrairieNet and LEEP (Library Experimental Education Program); interdisciplinary cybernetics research with the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL); and pioneering building, campus accessibility, and wheelchair athletics designs within DRES (Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services) research.

Our research collaboration adopts a distinct approach to innovation studies by looking to shed light on interdisciplinary digital developments in the Midwest that necessarily bridged expertise from social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and humanities. Our work proposes developing a means to extend research and pedagogical resources – both existing and proposed, and both physical and digital – to expand greater visibility of such local, multi-disciplinary histories around collaborative regional innovation. The project thus resonates with conference themes on interdisciplinary goals and conversations in the digital humanities as well as challenges in the communication of knowledge across disciplines whose bridgings represent the various potentials and "Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities."

Our group proposes a "soapbox" talk in which researchers from our multi-campus collaboration briefly narrate how local institutional and regional archives, living subjects and potential research participants, and the history of the various projects being studied shapes the local research process at each site. Researchers will share some preliminary findings from regional archives, highlights their takeaways from the overall process, and discuss how dialogue within and across sites organizes this collaborative research process. The goal is to highlight collaborative research engagement with regional archives as well dynamic, living institutional archives. In terms of technological considerations, our proposed talks would only require projection for working through our collaborative work on Scalar as well as other digital resources we may wish to highlight.

Archival Futures (Ali Rachel Pearl)

Archives are traditionally considered to be concerned exclusively with the past, but as archival scholar Michelle Caswell suggests, "How we as members of local and global communities remember the past is wholly bound up with how we imagine what is possible in the future." If archivist and scholars are silencing certain pasts by not making space for them in traditional memory institutions, they are disallowing marginalized and excluded voices and communities from using records, memories, and visions of their own pasts to imagine new futures. Given that, as Caswell says, "digital archives are now providing unprecedented opportunity for individuals to communicate memories, for communities to forge collective memories," it is time to begin evaluating how digital archives can be reimagined to serve marginalized communities and to build more just futures.

I am proposing a "soapbox" talk to highlight some current digital archival projects that are future oriented. I also intent to showcase a couple archival methodologies that utilize digital tools in ways that address race, gender, class, and access more effectively than traditional approaches to and understandings of archives. We cannot conceive of more socially just worlds in a digital era if we don't account for how marginalization of histories are inextricable from marginalized futures. Archives is just one area where digital humanities intersects with race, gender, and class, and it's a hugely important area if we are considering issues related to building new futures that depart from structurally oppressive colonialist, racist, sexist histories.

Difficult Digitization on a Dime: Crowd-sourcing Ideas to Harness Emerging Imaging Technology (Chris Strasbaugh)

https://youtu.be/TE6Ycwo8XlM

It started with a problem and a Raspberry Pi. Faced with having to photograph student architectural models for entry into our digital library, the question arose, how do we capture the interiors? Inspection cameras are very low resolution but with a fabrication lab at my disposal and the plethora of highly document solutions to similar problems on the internet, all I needed was a reel of ABS plastic, a 3D printer, and a Raspberry Pi to creatively document these difficult spaces. Using plans from Thingiverse, a camera kit with the Raspberry Pi, and a lot of trial-and-error we have created and continue to fine tune an inexpensive and much more robust camera for architectural models.

This project wasn't about solving a specific problem. It was more about changing our perspective about what is possible when you employ the help of hundreds of people through various crowd-sourcing sites and forums. Instead of searching for a replacement to our wide-format scanner, we are adapting the plans of a rolling, overhead video rig designed for DIY cooking shows and some open-source photo stitching software to provide us the flexibility to digitize large format drawings and architectural models for a fraction of the cost. We are also approaching 3d scanning and automation differently since there are detailed instructions on how to hack cameras to do what we need.

This approach to searching, hacking, adapting, and sharing ideas online helps us to tackle big problems in content creation and usability for the digital humanities. By harnessing the creativity and experience of a large community, everything is possible.

The Invisible Labor in Digital Collaborations (Dan Martin)

In Net Smart, Howard Rheingold highlights several new literacies that are important for interacting in with digital writing and media environments (5). His definition for collaboration literacy can help expose more fully how invisible labor works in digital collaborations. Rheingold mentions that coordination, cooperation, and collaboration are three symbiotic facets of group work that are important for digital collaborations, and they require a significant amount of hidden labor that goes unnoticed. Rheingold contends that coordination "requires all involved parties share information and modify their activities for mutual benefit" (154). This requirement for successful group work asks group members to give up power and control over certain aspects of the project and to learn other aspects of the project they may not be familiar with. This can create additional stresses and tensions to manage.

Requiring other members to learn information out of a larger, more structured, context can be difficult and frustrating. Asking group members to relinquish authority or power over ideas or areas of expertise requires a rhetorical negotiation process that is complicated and laborious. Cooperation requires an even larger "amount of commitment and risk . . . than coordination" because cooperation requires everyone to meet common goals and to move away from "self-interests" (Rheingold 154). The work that goes into convincing group members to abandon self-interest and to continually keep the group goals and objectives at the forefront can be extremely tedious and time consuming. This also is a task that must be rhetorically negotiated and managed throughout the project and not just at one time or point in the project. The third facet is the actual collaboration. This is the "collective action" taken to complete a task, and this collective action is based on how well coordination and cooperation are managed.

There is a significant amount of hidden labor taking place during digital collaborations that needs to be drawn out and accounted for. My presentation examines how students managed hidden labor in a website collaboration project I require in an upper division Writing in Digital Environments course. This assignment asks students from different disciplines (some of these disciplines are IT, Writing and Rhetoric, Advertising and PR, and Film) to interact, collaborate, and create a website resource for digital writing environments that requires them write code and text, and to make videos, infographics, charts, graphs, and images. The questions driving this research project and presentation are where does invisible work occur in digital collaborations? Why did it occur? What work went unnoticed and why? For this presentation, I surveyed students from two Writing in Digital Environments courses on invisible labor in their group projects, and this presentation explores the results of this survey in relation to the research I found on hidden labor and digital collaboration.

Why is Gale Shrinking America? Or, Sabin's Bibliotheca Americana and the Database's (National) Limits (Mary Lindsay Van Tine)

This "soapbox" talk will offer a genealogy of the Gale database Sabin Americana 1500-1926, tracing its origins through an earlier Readex microprint project to Joseph Sabin's Bibliotheca Americana, a monumental 29-volume "Dictionary of works related to America" begun in 1868 and completed in 1937. While Bonnie Mak, Ian Gadd, and others have explored the bibliographic roots of much-used digital resources like the ESTC and EBBO, the category of Americana has a distinct bibliographic tradition whose digital implications have not been examined. While many contemporary databases derive from earlier bibliographic projects organized by language or nation, "Americana" was for Sabin and his contemporaries a transnational and multilingual category that understood "America" as the entire Western Hemisphere. Sabin and other nineteenth-century bibliographers of "Americana" ultimately produced works with an implied teleological view of a New World history that began with "discovery" and culminated in the emergence of the United States; nevertheless, they conceived of the early history of the hemisphere as a shared one, and their work emerged from an extended scholarly network that encompassed not only the Anglophone but also the Hispanophone world.

While Gale's database borrows Sabin's name and title, it is otherwise strikingly vague on the exact nature of its relationship to the original print bibliography. A close examination reveals that, although the structuring logic of the database is not dissimilar to Sabin's alphabetic schema and indexing, its selection principles and framing radically redefine America as the United States. Unlike the original bibliography, the vast majority of the works included are in English, with few in Spanish and even fewer in indigenous languages. The search interface offers "subject" options that uncritically sort the entire span of New World history into U.S.-based periodizations: colonial era, early republic, antebellum, postbellum, and so on. These silent omissions both assume and reinforce the conflation of "America" and "United States." When a database that claims to be "drawn from Joseph Sabin's famed bibliography" and, like it, to "cove[r] four centuries of life in North, Central, and South America, and the West Indies," returns overwhelmingly English-language sources from the "colonial era," or fails to produce a single hit for one of the most prominent Mexican historians of the nineteenth century while returning dozens for his U.S. counterpart, the effect is not just inaccurate but deeply pernicious. I will argue that this dramatic shift is not so much a function of digital remediation as of a changed scholarly infrastructure that cannot accommodate the capaciousness of "Americana" in its earlier bibliographic sense. The logic of nineteenth-century Bibliotheca Americanas, I suggest, invites us to think otherwise, offering an alternate bibliographic framework that might inform the development of non-proprietary digital systems for bibliographic control.