Today’s little bug?
18 Monday Nov 2013
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in18 Monday Nov 2013
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in18 Monday Nov 2013
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in(I accidentally posted on this week’s readings last week)
I have been thinking quite a bit about how all of the different tools we preview and discuss in this course are and are not pedagogically friendly. The “rhetoric of construction” as described in the Bonnett seems entirely promising, but I cannot help but think of it alongside an article I read for another course in which students were text encoding historical documents. The latter article claimed that students gained a deeper appreciation and closer read of the text through this process. I do not doubt this I so; yet I thought it dramatically undersold the level of tedium involved in such a task. I don’t know enough about the construction of 3d environments to make such a critique, but I think the general question applies nonetheless. So long as much of the technological projects we pursue are fairly work and time intensive, how well do they fit into a course like history or English where there is much to do and not much time to do it?
I wonder about this primarily for my own practical purposes. I would like to have my own future students go through this type of learning by putting together in a semi literal manner the pieces of what they study, but I worry about the investment to payoff ratio of time spent and even about it perhaps being exploitative at some extremes.
To avoid these problems, are we relegated to boring but quick and easy for the time being? Can we structure more undergraduate courses to be, frankly, like this one, where there is a lab component alongside a more analytical approach? I also wonder what a constructionist approach might mean for breadth of subject matter. It would, seem that a course based in construction as a means of engagement would need to be decidedly more narrow in its focus. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, but the trade off seems worth questioning.
10 Sunday Nov 2013
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inI have been thinking quite a bit about how all of the different tools we preview and discuss in this course are and are not pedagogically friendly. The “rhetoric of construction” as described in the Bonnett seems entirely promising, but I cannot help but think of it alongside an article I read for another course in which students were text encoding historical documents. The latter article claimed that students gained a deeper appreciation and closer read of the text through this process. I do not doubt this I so; yet I thought it dramatically undersold the level of tedium involved in such a task. I don’t know enough about the construction of 3d environments to make such a critique, but I think the general question applies nonetheless. So long as much of the technological projects we pursue are fairly work and time intensive, how well do they fit into a course like history or English where there is much to do and not much time to do it?
I wonder about this primarily for my own practical purposes. I would like to have my own future students go through this type of learning by putting together in a semi literal manner the pieces of what they study, but I worry about the investment to payoff ratio of time spent and even about it perhaps being exploitative at some extremes.
To avoid these problems, are we relegated to boring but quick and easy for the time being? Can we structure more undergraduate courses to be, frankly, like this one, where there is a lab component alongside a more analytical approach? I also wonder what a constructionist approach might mean for breadth of subject matter. It would, seem that a course based in construction as a means of engagement would need to be decidedly more narrow in its focus. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, but the trade off seems worth questioning.
28 Monday Oct 2013
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inI am really interested in the Canada Through a Lens: the British Library Colonial Copyright Collection, for which a “hotchpotch of imperial muddling, colonial making-do and individual protectionism developed a collection of photographs that covers the length and breadth of Canada.” It is interesting in of itself but even more so as a product of the happenstance of bureaucracy (having to do with copyright). I wonder, in light of this week’s readings, what the limits are of viewing the somewhat arbitrary as generative of new connections. This is of course, not an entirely random collection. It has been curated and covers a particular place for a particular span of time; yet its subject matter is seemingly delimited most by what was of interest to photographers of the time rather than a central question, style, or event a collector desired to cover. As such, it has the effect of presenting a view of the preoccupations of the day, from the mundane but perhaps aesthetically pleasing or comfortingly familiar to the potential to build narratives (like the men above struggling to ride into the twentieth century) or capture strange occurrences. It is, as I suspect Daniel is suggesting, perhaps a bit naive to assume that free wandering is possible and always desirable. All the same, I find collections such as this that come together through a variety of circumstances more so than out of an active search, have the benefit of raising more questions (because they are not themselves the answer to one in the same sense).
I didn’t have the opportunity to get through all of it, but I think it would be quite interesting to look at such a collection in conversation with Daston’s Wonders and the Order of Nature. Daston states that wonder once existed (and does so again) on the margins of the natural. I think that in a very plain sense we see that here. A train is not so wondrous as a train derailed; a bear or a man of less interest when not embracing. They are captured just on the edge of their natural state. Yet there is so much of the mundane in this collection as well. Is this an echo of the golden period Daston is tracing, before the Enlightenment shunned the act of wonder form scientific inquiry, when the wondrous was for a moment a central concern? True their status as art objects may bespeak their marginality, fitting the notion that they do not belong properly to the categories of the sciences of greatest interest to Daston. Even so, her ways of thinking about where the wondrous fits in is compelling when facing any collection. Is wonder what propels the collection or what I bring to it? Do these photos I am calling mundane take on appeal only as the scenes they depict become antiquated? Is it possible we find wonder in the everyday only in the context in which we become hyper-saturated with the fantastic and, as in more modern photography and film, impossible?
21 Monday Oct 2013
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inI am taking Grafton two ways. One is that he is, useful to our purposes, telling a story about a network which we then see on the mapping the republic of letters website. The other is that he is telling a story about knowledge acquisition and cooperation relevant to scholarly exploration, visualized or no. As Nicole pointed out, Grafton stresses the general knowledge of a single scholar. While stressing the breadth of the individual, however, he is also revealing the ways in which such wide knowledge depended upon a system of connections. We seem much more enabled to make such connections now and I think that by and large people take advantage of this ability, though perhaps not with the same sense of urgency that the difficulty it posed in Locke’s and Voltaire’s time might have inspired. All of which is just to say I find it useful to think on this model both as network data and as a reflection on the use and function of networks. One thing that strikes me as particularly important, then, is that it would seem much of this correspondence had a specific intended audience and was in response to particular questions risen in the back and forth. Perhaps that is an idealistic view to imagine the republic of letters was fueled by genuine curiosity more than vanity or networking for networkings sake, but true or no it points to the ways in which the intention and nature of the exchange seem as important as the means and content.
A second, not especially related response I have to this week’s topic is a question I have been thinking about for awhile: When is a data visualization a work of art? Because they aim to be, and often are, quite aesthetically pleasing, network visualizations seem as good a place as any to interject such a question. In poking around a bit I found this man, Martin Krzywinski who is working on hive plots,
which he seems to feel are useful for observing data, but he also is taking issue with the ugliness of “hairball” network visualizations. Of course appearance and legibility and usefulness are all related. He is also working, however, on this:
e.e. spammings, filtering spam to create poems in the style of e.e. cummings. The second is very clearly a move from useless data to art. What of the first? Can useful data be art or does it, should it, always serve a purpose? I know, I am going down a rabbit hole by suggesting art is art because of its lack of utility. I don’t really want to open up a ‘what is art’ debate, but I am very curious about what sets the boundaries of a visualization project in the digital humanities.
09 Wednesday Oct 2013
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in07 Monday Oct 2013
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inThe biggest puzzle for me coming out of this week’s reading lies somewhere between Bodenhamer’s epistemological concerns and Monmonier’s many representations of the same data.
These images are probably familiar to people:
The first is a map of the world “upside down.” My primary reaction to this map is how well it illustrates the primacy afforded to North or ‘up,’ at least in Western culture. Look how superior Australia looks! What I don’t realize when I look at that map is the extent to which I appreciate the altered perspective, but still more or less consider it to be a distortion of physical reality. For that I need these next two photos, taken from Apollo 17 as it orbited Earth in 1972. The first is the actual photo as it was taken. The one beneath is the photo as it was made public (known as the “Blue Marble”); it has been flipped. This may be a slightly embarrassing thing to admit, but it actually takes me a minute to understand how it is possible to take an upright photo with the South Pole on top. The extent to which this spinning object with no real point of reference in the universe exists in my imagination as having an actual ‘up’ side is a fairly hard idea to break.
I bring up these examples because I think they illustrate the problem with how all things in mapping are relative–literally, in the sense that space is only measured by relationships, but everything about how that relationship is oriented is subject to interpretation. I think this raises difficulties but also really interesting possibilities for mapping.
Monmonier creates several maps, number line plots, and scale labels for the same data. The differences are rather dramatic. His most prominent example in the statistical data chapter has to do with infant mortality in New Jersey. He is trying to figure out how to represent Essex county, where the majority of deaths occur, but which is also heavily populated. The many versions create really disparate perceptions of how focused in Essex county the problem is. It seems fair to modify the visualization of the data to something closer to a per capita representation: without it, it seems like there is a unique problem in that county that other counties do not have; with it, you can’t see as well the concentration of total deaths and may have a skewed view of the actual numbers. And this seems a far more straight forward mapping project than a lot of others.
The question I am getting to is one of process: How does one ascertain the scale and the set up that best demonstrates a desired narrative, without warping the data too far to support that narrative? To what extent is our freedom to reconfigure these relationships limited to the graphicacy of our audience–their ability to recognize the world as the world from a unique but no less true point of reference?
30 Monday Sep 2013
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inReading for this week, I was reminded of an op-ed in The New York Times that came out at least a couple of years ago. Like a lot of op-eds in this paper, it was about declining higher education: wherefore and what to do (I cannot find it anywhere, but swear to its existence). This particular article was about breaking down silo modeled departments in favor of topic oriented majors. The example it used was water. A student could learn about water crises historically and anthropologically, use poli-sci to get into the politics of fresh water distribution, and of course learn the science of water treatment, geology and geography of watershed, you get the idea. It is intriguing and, I think, not unlike the siloed model it seeks to replace, problematic.
The question of how to divide areas of inquiry (in or out of academia) is interesting to consider alongside Steve’s article on, among other things, the implications of causality in the construction of chronologies. Taxonomies, like timelines, come with assumptions, and any delineation means a potential leaving off or flattening. I wonder what work they do together. We of course already consider the what and not simply the when in constructing a timeline, but I think it is useful, if also a bit daunting, to consider how the boundaries of the subject matter have been demarcated. Which is to say, the subject matter and also the frame around that subject matter that makes it seem to all fairly naturally belong.
The issue I have with the water idea is that is geared to ‘solve the world’s problems,’ which seems increasingly to mean that historically contingent situations with real human actors can be reduced to a language of engineering and that all challenges are equally design challenges. Could a timeline help? Could it take the pinpoint of an issue and extend it back to a more complex understanding? Can interdisciplinary questions create, if not better, than at least, diverse chronologies? Of course timelines are by their nature history, but which histories bear relevance to one another seems to still be a fairly open field. Some of the suggestions in the reading highlight the ways in which the digital could be especially useful in thinking through these questions.
22 Sunday Sep 2013
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in15 Sunday Sep 2013
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