Category Archives: Uncategorized

Bibliographies, Networks, and CUNY Academic Works

I was really excited about doing a network analysis, even though I seem to have come all the way over here to DH just to do that most librarianly of research projects, a citation analysis.

I work heavily with our institutional repository, CUNY Academic Works, so I wanted to do a project having to do with that.  Institutional repositories are one of the many ways that scholarly works can be made openly available.  Ultimately, I’m interested in seeing whether the works that are made available through CAW are, themselves, using open access research, but for this project, I thought I’d start a little smaller.

CAW allows users to browse by discipline using this “Sunburst” image.

Each general subject is divided into smaller sub-disciplines.  Since I was hoping to find a network, I wanted to choose a sub-discipline that was narrow but fairly active. I navigated to “Arts and Humanities,” from there to “English Language and Literature,” and finally to “Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority.” From there, I was able to look at works in chronological order. Like most of the repository, this subject area is dominated by dissertations and capstone papers; this is really great for my purposes because I am very happy to know which authors students are citing and from where.

The data cleaning process was laborious, and I think I got a little carried away with it. After I’d finished, I tweeted about it, and Hannah recommended pypdf as a tool I could have used to do this work much more quickly.  Since I’d really love to do similar work on a larger scale, this is a really helpful recommendation, and I’m planning on playing with it some more in the future (thanks, Hannah!)

I ended up looking at ten bibliographies in this subject, all of which were theses and dissertations from 2016 or later.  Specifically:

 Jarzemsky, John. “Exorcizing Power.”

Green, Ian F. P. “Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention and the Atlantic’s Divine Economist”

La Furno, Anjelica. “’Without Stopping to Write a Long Apology’: Spectacle, Anecdote, and Curated Identity in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom”

Danraj, Andrea A. “The Representation of Fatherhood as a Declaration of Humanity in Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives”

Kaval, Lizzy Tricano. “‘Open, and Always, Opening’: Trans- Poetics as a Methodology for (Re)Articulating Gender, the Body, and the Self ‘Beyond Language ’”

Brown, Peter M. “Richard Wright’ s and Chester Himes’s Treatment of the Concept of Emerging Black Masculinity in the 20th Century”

Brickley, Briana Grace. “’Follow the Bodies”: (Re)Materializing Difference in the Era of Neoliberal Multiculturalism”

Eng, Christopher Allen. “Dislocating Camps: On State Power, Queer Aesthetics & Asian/Americanist Critique”

Skafidas, Michael P. “A Passage from Brooklyn to Ithaca: The Sea, the City and the Body in the Poetics of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy”

Cranstoun, Annie M. “Ceasing to Run Underground: 20th-Century Women Writers and Hydro-Logical Thought”

Many other theses and dissertations are listed in Academic Works, but are still under embargo. For those members of the class who will one day include your own work in CAW, I’d like to ask on behalf of all researchers that you consider your embargo period carefully! You have a right to make a long embargo for your work if you wish, but the sooner it’s available, the more it will help people who are interested in your subject area.

In any case, I extracted the authors’ names from these ten bibliographies and put them into Gephi to make a graph.  I thought about using the titles of journals, which I think will be my next project, but when I saw that all the nodes on the graph have such a similar appearance graphically, I was reluctant to mix such different data points as authors and journals.

As I expected, each bibliography had its own little cluster of citations, but there were a few authors that connected them, and some networks were closer than others.

Because I was especially interested in the authors that connected these different bibliographies, I used Betweenness Centrality to map these out, to produce a general shape like this:

This particular configuration of the data uses the Force Atlas layout.  There were several available layouts and I don’t how they’re made, but this one did a really nice job of rendering my data in a way that looked 3D and brought out some relationships among the ten bibliographies.

Some Limitations to My Data

Hannah discussed this in her post, and I’d run into a lot of the same issues and had forgotten to include it in my blog post!  Authors are not always easy entities to grasp. Sometimes a cited work may have several authors, and in some cases, dissertation authors cited edited volumes by editor, rather than the specific pieces by their authors. Some of the authors were groups rather than individuals (for instance, the US Supreme Court), and some pieces were cited anonymously.

In most cases, I just worked with what I had. If it was clear that an author was being cited in more than one way, I tried to collapse them, because there were so few points of contact that I wanted to be sure to bring them all out. There were a few misspellings of Michel Foucault’s name, but it was really important to me to know how relevant he was in this network.

Like Hannah, I pretended that editors were authors, for the sake of simplicity.  Unlike her, I didn’t break out the authors in collaborative ventures, although I would have in a more formal version of this work.  It simply added too much more data cleaning on top of what I’d already done.  So I counted all the co-authored works as the work of the first author — flawed, but it caught some connections that I would have missed otherwise.

Analyzing the Network

Even from this distance, we can get a sense of the network. For instance, there is only one “island bibliography,” unconnected to the rest.

Note, however, that another isolated node is somewhat obscured by its positioning: Jarzemsky, whose only connection to the other authors is through Judith Butler.

So, the two clearest conclusions were these:

  • There is no source common to all ten bibliographies, but nine of them share at least one source with at least one other bibliography!
  • However, no “essential” sources really stand out on the chart, either. A few sources were cited by three or four authors, but none of them were common to all or even a majority of bibliographies.

My general impression, then, is that there are a few sources that are important enough to be cited very commonly, but perhaps no group of authors that are so important that nearly everyone needs to cite them. This makes sense, since “Ethnic and Cultural Minority” lumps together many different groups, whose networks may be more visible with a more focused corpus.

There’s also a disparity among the bibliographies; some included many more sources than others (perhaps because some are PhD dissertations and others are master’s theses, so there’s a difference in length and scope). Eng built the biggest bibliography, so it’s not too surprising that his bibliography is near the center of the grid and has the most connections to other bibliographies; I suspect this is an inherent bias with this sort of study.

The triangle of Eng, Brickley and Kaval had some of the densest connections in the network.  I try to catch a little of it in this screenshot:

In the middle of this triangle, several authors are cited by each of these authors, including Judith Butler, Homi Babhi, Sara Ahmed, and Gayle Salamon.  The connections between Brickley and Eng include some authors who speak to their shared interest in Asian-American writers, such as Karen Tei Yamashita, but also authors like Stuart Hall, who theorizes multiculturalism.  On the other side, Kaval and Eng both cite queer theorists like Jack Halberstam and Barbara Voss, but there are no connections between Brickley and Kaval that aren’t shared by Eng. There’s a similar triangle among Eng, Skafidas, and Green, but Skafidas has fewer connections to the four authors I’ve mentioned than they have to each other. This is interesting given the size of Skafidas’s bibliography; he cites many others that aren’t referred to in the other bibliographies.

(Don’t mind Jarzmesky; he ended up here but doesn’t share any citations with either Skafidas or Cranstoun.)

On the other hand, there is a stronger connection between Skafidas and Cranstoun. Skafidas writes on Cavafy and Cranstoun on Woolf, so they both cite modernist critics. However, because they are not engaging with multiculturalism as many of the other authors are, they have fewer connections to the others. In fact, Cranstoun’s only connection to an author besides Skafidas is to Eng, via Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (which makes sense, as Cranstoun is interested in gender and Eng in queerness).  Similarly, La Furno and Danraj, who both write about slave narratives, are much more closely connected to each other than to any of the other authors – but not as closely as I’d have expected, with only two shared connections between them. The only thing linking them to the rest of the network is La Furno’s citation of Hortense Spillers, shared by Brickley.

My Thoughts

I’d love to do this work at a larger scale. Perhaps if I could get a larger sample of papers from this section of CAW, I’d start seeing the different areas that fall into this broad category of “Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority.” I’m seeing some themes already – modernism, Asian-American literature, gender, and slave narratives seem to form their own clusters.  The most isolated author on my network wrote about twentieth-century African American literature and would surely have been more connected if I’d found more works dealing with the same subject matter. As important as intersectionality is, there are still networks based around specific literatures related to specific identity categories, with only a few  prominent authors that speak to overlapping identities. We may notice that Eng, who is interested in the overlap between ethnicity and queerness, is connected to Brickley on one side (because she is also interested in Asian-American literature) and Kaval on the other (because she is also interested in queerness and gender).

Of course, there are some flaws with doing this the way that I have; since I’m looking at recent works, they are unlikely to cite each other, so the citations are going in only one direction and not making what I think of as a “real” network. However, I do think it’s valuable to see what people at CUNY are doing!

But I guess I’m still wondering about that – are these unidirectional networks useful, or is there a better way of looking at those relationships? I suppose a more accurate depiction of the network would involve several layers of citations, but I worry about the complexity that would produce.

In any case, I still want to look at places of publication. It’s a slightly more complex approach, but I’d love to see which authors are publishing in which journals and then compare the open access policies of those journals. Which ones make published work available without a subscription? Which ones allow authors to post to repositories like this one?

Also: I wish I could post a link to the whole file! It makes a lot more sense when you can pan around it instead of just looking at screenshots.

Reaction to How not to Teach Digital Humanities

I related to this article on a more than one level.

Like Cordell, I’ve tangled with our curriculum process, and it can be a frustrating process, especially when proposing a new course[i]. The departmental curriculum committee will strongly criticize a new course This isn’t entirely a bad thing: as a department, we only want to send strong proposals to the college-wide curriculum committee[ii].

Cordell later suggests that, rather than have separate DH courses, that we incorporate DH sensibilities into our existing courses. I think this makes sense: I have been incorporating digital work into my classes for as long as I’ve been at LaGuardia.

Another interesting point is that our students think that they’re better with technology than their professors are. Students have a point, but it’s easy to overstate this. I’ve seen many students have issues with digitally based assignments because, well, if it’s not an app on their phone, they’re just not comfortable with it.[iii]

Interestingly, by the end of the piece, Cordell is giving advice on how to teach DH, rather than the opposite. I think the author makes two points I want to comment on[iv].

  • Start small
  • Scaffold everything

Start small

This is essential. I have been teaching Voce and Diction for well over a decade now. My students do weekly recordings (two of which are digital), a midterm project, and a final project. It took years to get it to this place. I started small, with monthly recordings, then I added my final project, then weekly recordings.

That’s on a curricular level. On a “course project” level, start with one project. Here are some things I’ve learned:

  1. Find the type of technology you are comfortable with. Run with it.
  2. Try doing it yourself first. You’ll see some of the difficulties your students have, and will be better able to help them.
  3. Expect that it won’t go smoothly. ESPECIALLY the first time. That’s okay. Learn from it. Figure out what works and what doesn’t. No matter how much you plan, you will need to adjust the assignment.
  4. Have a hard and fast deadline. Without this, several of your students just won’t turn their projects at all.
  5. Present the final products in class. Students tend to do a better job on assignments because they don’t want to look the fool in front of their classmates. (Well, usually.)

In my case, I use the technology around digital storytelling. I do four small projects with it per term:

  1. The Digital Poem – my students select a poem from a list of poems. They have to record it, find pictures to match, and turn it into a little movie.[v]
  2. Hiawatha—a few weeks later, students are given pieces of Hiawatha, and have to do the same thing as they did with the Digital Poem, though their pictures have to be either Native American or North American wilderness imagery.[vi]
  3. Midterm project. I give my students a choice: a midterm or a project. They never choose the exam. The past few years, they have had to produce a three minute long video about one of the United States presidents.
  4. Final project. This is the States project. Students randomly choose a state and have to produce a three minute long video about it.

I can  do this, because, at my school, Voice and Diction has a lab hour attached to it. They can do their projects (or at least start them) in class.

The other thing I want to focus on is scaffolding. It’s absolutely necessary. It needs to be explicit. Step-by-step instructions. Expect questions.

You also need to show your students how to use the technology. You need to make time for it in your class. I’ve been doing this for so long that I can train students in my tech in a half hour or so.

With the Presidents and States projects, I have lists of questions that they turn in, so I know they’re doing research and I can check it.[vii]

I would encourage you to figure out what technology (or technologies) you want to use and run with them. Don’t get frustrated: accept that you will have to adapt and edit. That’s not a bad thing.

[i] Revising an existing course isn’t nearly as difficult.

[ii] This makes sense. When I’ve gone before the college-wide committee, I didn’t have any problems. Part of that is because the departmental committee demanded edits.

[iii] Yes, I know this makes me sound old. (You can’t see this, but I’m shaking a cane at you, while yelling at you to get off my lawn.)

[iv] Some people might refer to these as “Best Practices”. I hesitate to use that term because what works best for me might not work for you because we are different people and might be teaching wildly different student populations and/or different levels of institutional support.

[v] This sounds more difficult than it is. I do it with Audacity (a free audio recording software) and Windows MovieMaker (which is probably not free anymore, though, honestly, it should be.)

[vi] We also discuss things like cultural appropriation when we do this.

[vii] You would be amazed at the research errors I’ve seen. For instance, the Grand Canyon has appeared in thirteen different states.

Caselaw Access Project

A large new open dataset was announced today:

The Caselaw Access Project (“CAP”) expands public access to U.S. law.
Our goal is to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law Library.

https://case.law/

More on Visualization

Much to ponder about visualizations, thanks to Micki’s excellent presentation today of her work. I wanted to note for the class a brilliant piece of visualized data that the great sociologist and educator W.E.B Dubois developed for the American exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. His goal was the help visitors understand the status of African Americans in the U.S. in that period of racial repression and Jim Crow. You can check out Dubois’s incredibly modern visual presentations on the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=%22lot%2011931%22%20NOT%20medal&st=grid&co=anedub&loclr=blogpic

I think that these charts and graphs are powerful and quite beautiful visualizations that help reveal the world of African Americans in the U.S. (and especially in Georgia) 118 years ago. I believe they remain  powerful in their impact precisely because of their clear and accessible design and brilliant use of color.

Make Space for Ghosts: Lauren Klein’s Graphic Visualizations of James Hemings in Thomas Jefferson’s Archive

In “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” Lauren Klein discusses a letter by Thomas Jefferson to a friend in Baltimore which she accessed through Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition , a digital archive which makes about 12,000 and “a significant portion” of 25,000 letters from and to Jefferson available to subscribers of the archive. In this letter, Jefferson asks his friend in Baltimore to give a message to his “former servant James” to illustrate how a simple word search would fail to identify that “James” as his former slave James Hemings, the brother of Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s slave and probably mother of five of his children.[1] Drawing our attention to how the “issue of archival silence – or gaps in the archival record – [which remain] difficult to address” in graphic visualization, Klein notes that the historians who built the Jefferson Papers archive added metadata to indicate that the James referred to in the above-mentioned letter was James Hemings [664]. I wonder what the metadata looks like; I wonder whether it provides sources or reflection, and what the extratextual conversation going on at the back end of the archive, if conversation it is, reveals.

While meta-annotation may appear to be a good way to fill the gaps of archival silence, Klein argues that adding scholarship as metadata creates too great a dependence on the choices the author of the archive made. The addition of metadata to the letter to the friend in Baltimore makes me wonder where in the archive metadata was added, where not, and why. Are all the gaps filled? Had metadata not been added to the letter Klein discusses, an analysis of the archive could conclude that Jefferson never makes any mention of James Hemings in the letter he wrote to his friend in Baltimore in 1801 to try to find Hemings, or in the ensuing correspondence between Hemings and Jefferson through Jefferson’s friend, in which Jefferson tries to hire Hemings and Hemings sets terms that were probably not met [667]. A word search in the archive, however, pulls up only inventories of property, documents of manumission, notes about procuring centers of pork and cooking oysters (Hemings was Jefferson’s chef) and finally a letter in which Jefferson asks whether it’s true that Hemings committed suicide [671]. How, asks Klein, do we fill in the gaps between the pieces of information we have? She concludes that we can’t. How do we show the silences then, she asks; how do we extract more meaning from the documents that exist – letters, inventories, ledgers and sales receipts – “without reinforcing the damaging notion that African American voices from before emancipation […] are silent, and irretrievably lost?” [665].

Klein calls for a shift from “identifying and recovering silences” to “animating the mysteries of the past” [665] but not by traditional methods. Instead, Klein says that the fields of computational linguistics and data visualization help make archival silences visible and by doing so “reinscribe cultural criticism at the center of digital humanities work” [665]. Through visualization Klein fills the historical record with “ghosts” and silences, rather than trying to explain away the gaps. The visualizations she creates are both mysterious and compelling, and bear evidence in a way that adding more words does not.

[1]Sarah “Sally“ Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835) was an enslaved woman of mixed race owned by PresidentThomas Jefferson of the United States. There is a “growing historical consensus” among scholars that Jefferson had a long-term relationship with Hemings, and that he was the father of Hemings’ five children,[1] born after the death of his wife Martha Jefferson. Four of Hemings’ children survived to adulthood.[2] Hemings died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1835. [Wikipedia contributors, “Sarah ‘Sally’ Hemings”]

Praxis Assignment: Mapping My Recently Played List

I like to think I listen to music from a range of artists around the world, so I thought I’d test the theory. I used my recently played list on iTunes to see how true this is. I started with a month of music but it was way too large so I limited the list to the last two weeks. It included 59 songs. I listened to two full albums, so the number of artist on the map is way less than. If I listened to multiple songs from the same artist I put my the one I like most that was on the recently played list.

Picking criteria was a bit difficult. Questions I had to consider included deciding whether to use where someone is working now or where a person was born? How am I showing difference between music genres? Can I get sound in here somehow?

In the end I decided to go with the birthplace/hometown. My data comes from wikipedia. For some artists I couldn’t find a city. This happen for a couple African artists and newer American artists. For those I dropped the pin in the state they are from. My little exercise  yielded a few surprises.  For example, Yaeji is a musician that makes electronic music that uses a mix of Korean and English. I thought she was making music in Korea but it turns out she is based in Brooklyn. I did this project using a larger dataset to start (then got super tired and narrowed my list) and some of my favorite Afrobeat and Soca artists were actually from the U.S. and England. This trend got me thinking about heritage, culture, and what things (food, music, ideologies) we adopt from our parents. I wanted the map to be somewhat interactive, so I added the links to the songs in case anyone wants to take a listen. The pushpins have youtube links to the songs.

Overall I think my experiment went pretty well. The only continent I missed was South America. I invite people to take a look and a listen sometime.

Legend: Purple pushpins: R&b, Blue pushpins: Mellow/sleepy time, Green pushpins: Hip hop, White pushpin: Afrobeats, Light Blue pushpin: Electronic, Red pushpin: Rock, Pink pushpin: Pop;   Yellow stick: Songs I thought people should check out by upcoming artists

View Map

 

 

 

The Image of Absence: Klein

I’m 3/4 of the way through this reading and as much as Hemings’s ghost is palpable, the historian in me is quite concerned with WHY Jefferson “for reasons unknown, failed to comply with [Hemings’s] request” for the terms of his employment and shrewdly specifying that it be in Jefferson’s own hand. I’d really like to explore the absent reasons to illuminate them. What could have prevented him, Jefferson, from providing this, or, is there some archival evidence that perhaps Jefferson didn’t want to provide Hemings with this. I find myself angered at Jefferson, given his prolific letter writing, letter-copying and letter filing/archiving, that he didn’t provide this to Hemings. Or perhaps he did but did so via ephemera?

My outrage softened, however, near the end of the reading as I read about the materiality Jefferson undertook in preparing Hemings’s “emancipation agreement” which he “penned in his special ink, encased in his imported paper, copied in his copying press, and then placed in his personal archive to preserve” (682) as Jefferson routinely did with his “significant” correspondence.

Via subjective analysis, then, I echo the call that Klein takes up from Alan Liu “to reinscribe cultural criticism at the center of digital humanities work” (665) and thereby offer the following:

WHAT IF, in preparing Hemings’s “emancipation agreement” — A HORRIFYING, OXYMORON CONTRADICTION-IN-TERMS PHRASE that MUST BE re-thought AND re-named BY ALL scholars ASAP (I mean “agreement” really?!) — Jefferson was actually elevating Hemings to the status of his most respected correspondents? Through his careful and mindful materiality toward this document, and his “awareness of his own historical legacy” (662) perhaps Jefferson is leaving a trail of crumbs for posterity of his regard of Hemings as a person and a chef, and not as a slave who lived and toiled invisibly, reduced to a mere “line of data” and “object of “empirical knowledge” in his farm book.

I do not put it past Jefferson to have scoffed at Hemings’s request for the terms of his employment as the likely reason for potentially not providing it. But I also do not put it past Jefferson to have left a watermark, albeit in quite “invisible ink”, of his friendship and perhaps even very deep personal regard for Hemings, for those of us looking to illuminate it.

Visualization as Argument: Klein

The title of this reading, which is the transcript of Lauren Klein’s talk of the same title, really spoke to me (all pun but an unintended one).

Ever since Prof. Gold attended ITP Core 1, a course that I was enrolled in last Fall, as a guest speaker and posed the topic “Is making scholarship? Yes, if there’s a scholarly argument” I’ve been really hooked on this concept.

So while this reading is brief, Lauren Klein packs much into it. She really made me sit straight up on the couch as I read that the great Transcendentalist and Feminist, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, founder of the famed eponymous book store AND the first kindergarten in the U.S. AND editor of The Dial is ALSO a/the pioneer in datavis?! It doesn’t surprise me given her brilliance, especially in educating, but it does amaze me. (On a related tangent, I’m recalling that American 1-room schoolhouses were also referred to as Peabody schoolhouses? I don’t feel like Googling to fact check this right now.)

Is everyone/anyone marveling at how Peabody took a chronological subject, literally The Chronological History of the United States and translated it to an abstract grid? She didn’t make a vertical list, or a horizontal timeline, but rather adopted a linear-ality of a whole different order, shunning the xy axis in her design to plot the U.S. events-to-date in 1856 — on a grid.

Her use of a grid with bissected boxes/triangles, much like the grid we used in The Object Library to lay out the exhibition’s cubic spaces and elevations to install the objects (which I described in class last week vis a vis my mapping project of TOL, as a difficult task to do from the grid) AND the origin of this low-tech system “developed in Poland in the 1820’s” also amazes me.

Peabody’s Grid of 1856 U.S. (my title) as conveyed by Klein, serves as a touchstone example of Klein’s thesis in this talk which is: “visualization methods help us better understand the process of knowledge production“.

Peabody’s Grid and its intended abstraction “appeal to the senses directly” and Peabody’s even more pressing intention “to evoke pleasure” is really radical. Pleasure in knowledge production. What a concept! I had a moment of pleasure while mapping TOL on the map/globe of beautiful planet Earth as I “played” with placing/plotting the objects’ locations with a “pin” of my choice (an icon I created from TOL artwork — please see my project map at LOCUS for this icon.)

I would plot or characterize Peabody’s “knowledge work” flow (my phrase) as: knowledge of history by way of Peabody’s student coloring in their OWN grids’ triangles — which becomes an act of producing a personal image of history by the student/citizen — leads to an embodiment, a personal investment, in history, and its agent: politics.

Peabody’s Grid is therefore, both her own political stance and her own brand of revolutionary, feminist pedagogy as a “female knowledge worker.” Peabody’s Grid is also inherently democratic to me because by having students (read: citizens) create/color their own charts, “Peabody flattens (literally) the relationship between the putative producer of knowledge and its perceiver” thereby, leveling the teacher/student dynamic.

It stands to reason, then, that Peabody’s Grid Is a strong example of “method as argument”.

Another concept from Klein’s talk that stood out to me is that of labor. Color Your World is not a cliche or trite phrase from a pop song because it takes such labor in to account while also connoting the important dynamics of agency and authority in what constitutes knowledge and its production.