This piece was a thought provoking look at infrastructure and the many different ways to analyze it. From just the practical side of things, I hadn’t really considered things like funding to actually be a part of infrastructure, although, clearly, it is.

As fascinating as the various discussions of infrastructure here were, I’m not going to focus on them. This article got me to thinking about what is and isn’t defined as infrastructure.

Let’s take Google as an example. Is Google internet infrastructure? I would argue “yes.” Maybe not in the traditional sense, but, still.

Google is more than just a search engine, though its role as the most prominent search engine out there puts it in this category for me. Google also powers so many other things (Chrome, Google docs, for instance, and a variety of other apps). A person’s entire online existence can be curated via Google.

The counterargument might be that Google isn’t necessary. There are alternatives to everything it offers, Bing for searches, Firefox for browsing, etc. So, while you CAN manage your entire online experience through Google, you don’t have to.

While this is true, much of the infrastructure out there is optional. Most of us opt to use it, but it isn’t required. So, I tend to think of Google as online infrastructure.

Let’s talk social media. Is a site like Facebook infrastructure? This isn’t nearly as clear cut (in my opinion).

For one thing, while billions of people use FB, it doesn’t do the things that Google does. FB doesn’t offer a competing search engine or anything like Google docs (at least that I’m aware of).

I’m not saying that FB isn’t important. It is on many levels, from the personal (staying in touch with people far away) to the business world (look at all these people! they have money to spend!) to the academic (data analysis and collect — which also happens in the business world part of FB). I’m just saying it differs significantly from Google. So, while I think that Google should be considered internet infrastructure, I don;t think FB should.

N.B.: The other articles may take up this subject. I haven’t gotten to them yet. I was just reacting to this one.

For those who couldn’t make it to the Lightning Talks on Tuesday, here is the list of the great & cool projects that were presented:

1- Manuscript builder
by Teresa Ober – GC
https://newmedialab.cuny.edu/project/digital-pedagogical-tool-for-teaching-research-methods/

2- The fabric of Cultures: Systems in the Making
By Eugenia Paulicelli – Queen’s College & GC
http://fabricofcultures.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/

3- DH as OER
by our colleague Nancy Foasberg – Queens college

4- Art history teaching resources (AHTR)
http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/

5- Net-Art
netart.commons.gc.cuny.edu

6- Building and Modeling undergrad DH research
by Dr. Andie Silva – York College

7- Translating Nuova York 
by Julie Van Peteghem – Hunter College

8-  Visualizing epistemology
by David Giuseppe Colasanto & Julian Gonzalez de Leon Heiblum – GC

9- Communities of Platform Development from OPENLAB at CITY TECH
By Kristen Hackett – GC
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/
AND Commons in a Box OpenLab: A Commons for Open Learning
by Matthew Gold
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/openroad/announcing-commons-in-a-box-openlab/
https://commonsinabox.org/

10- QC Voices
by Stefano Morello – GC
http://qcvoices.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/

11- Expanding Communities of Practice: DH research Institute
By Lisa Rhody & Kalle Westerling – GC
http://dhinstitutes.org/

12-Digital Publishing with Manifold Scholarship with University of Minnesota Press
By Matthew Gold & Jojo Kerlin – GC
https://manifoldapp.org/

The concept of public history in the digital sphere as described in Cameron Blevins’ “Digital History’s Perpetual Future Tense” and Leslie Madsen-Brooks’ “‘I Nevertheless Am a Historian’” reminded me of the New York Public Library’s public projects. Anyone with internet access can help “interpret” historical materials in the library’s collections by pinpointing locations on maps, transcribing documents and polishing computer-generated results.

There’s the Building Inspector project – with the tagline “Kill time. Make History.” – that involves “training computers to recognize building shapes” on old maps, primarily from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and asking volunteers to verify the results. The intent is not only to document the buildings and neighborhoods of centuries past but also to observe how the city has changed over time and make this information “organized and searchable.” Other projects include:

• Emigrant City: Transcribing information found on handwritten mortgage and bond ledgers from Emigrant Savings Bank records.
• What’s on the Menu?: Transcribing old restaurant menus and tagging the geographic location of the restaurants.

This use of collaboration and making old images, maps and documents available for public input reflects the ideals of digital humanities and is a form of “expanding access to the past,” to borrow Blevins’ words in describing the emergence of public history.

He writes: “A commitment to public engagement and accessibility has democratized both the consumption and production of history.”

By getting the public involved, or at least those who can use the internet, the NYPL gives people “early” access – that is, access before the completion of the projects – to their historical collections to build the information that is and will be stored about that material. In turn, these efforts will allow visitors to not just search more easily for and within the texts and images but also analyze, say, the textual data.

(As a sidetone, this effort also demonstrates that when it comes to extracting text and shapes from historical documents and other material, human verification of computer-generated results is necessary – not to mention, human verification of the work of other humans as all the projects make sure to have multiple volunteers checking and double checking the transcriptions.)

At the same time, these tasks are able to be open to anyone who wants to volunteer their time perhaps because the work it is asking participants to do is clear-cut – verify or write out what it says in the documents. In this case “interpretation” is primarily inputting information. Interpretation in the sense of argumentation of the material on the part of the volunteers would be done on their own, separate from the project. This certainly avoids the potential pitfalls of “crowdsourcing history via the “‘wisdom of the crowds’” that Marshall Poe warns against, according to Madsen-Brooks.

I recently attended a workshop on HTML/CSS that was incredibly fun and informative. Going into this workshop, my knowledge of HTML was limited to what I learned building MySpace pages over 10 years ago. The workshop was well organized to cater the students of various backgrounds that attended. Patrick Sweeney organized and led the workshop, and Stephen Morello kindly assisted those that ran into technical issues.

The objectives of the workshop were as follows:

 “By the end of this workshop, participants will:

– Familiarize themselves with the anatomy of a webpage and how the internet     works.

– Understand the basics of the HTML and CSS markdown languages.

– Use HTML, CSS, and a text editor to build a small website.”

My understanding of the difference between HTML and CSS was cleared up early, when HTML was described as the bones of website building, and CSS the style. Understanding the purpose of HTML/CSS as languages was a key component that I think many other programming classes fail to address. I tried to learn Python over the summer with an online course, for example, and didn’t know that it was commonly used as a glue language until I googled it just now.

The workshop was broken down into HTML basics, and CSS basics. HTML basics included an introduction, and an opening activity where we viewed the code source of the New York Times website. We then created our own rudimentary website using a basic HTML template on a text editor like Sublime.From there, we covered tags and elements, paragraphs and headings, links, images, and conventions. CSS basics covered HTML/CSS integration, rule sets, filtering, classes and IDs, selectors, and troubleshooting. All in all, my poor website looked like this:

By the end of the two-hour workshop, the vibes of the room were overwhelmingly positive. Almost everyone had created their very own website that looked like it came straight out of the year 1998, and we were very proud of ourselves. We concluded the workshop with viewing some examples of websites created with HTML/CSS that looked very sleek, and really saw their potential as languages.

At the eleventh hour, Palladio finally worked for me — hooray!

I’m trying to contain my excitement and relief as I share my Process Notes.

My project began with a plan to “visualize absence” through “The Effect of the AIDS crisis epidemic in NYC on the Performing Arts” because as you can imagine, the performing arts tragically lost hundreds of artists to AIDS, as well as the legacy of training, peaking in the early-90’s. By peaking, I mean  “peaking” through decimation, so I thought it would be powerful to show the individuals disappearing from their individual disciplines (dance, acting, voice, writing, choreography, directing, set design, wardrobe, makeup, lighting, publicity, stage management, etc.) through their deaths. I was particularly moved by a photo gallery I’d seen entitled “Faces of Aids”

It’s an amazing annual tribute EW magazine published, in this case, for the year 1992. It’s profound to see the faces and read the names along with their professions (mostly arts-related). My plan was to do a reverse treatment of the photo gallery in datavis.

I started working with Palladio by experimenting with my own spreadsheet for PREFERENCE, my ITP & DH humanities references digital pedagogical tool project, but could not get Palladio to do anything — except frustrate me. Then it dawned on me that my spreadsheet is not a “dataset” but a “set of data” and I hope I’m accurate in that simple observation. Moral of the story: as I effort to datavis PREFERENCE, the spreadsheet has to be spot on, much like Micki Kaufman described to us in class and also during a datavis workshop I took with her in Spring.

So I had to abandon my “AIDS Visualizing Absence” concept in search of a reliable dataset.

I found many through UNICEF and I was especially intrigued because they have alot of AIDS-related datasets. I considered these but settled on:

UNICEF’s PRIMARY EDUCATION DATA and the specific dataset for Education: Primary net attendance rate – Percentage (by country)

I was so psyched when I achieved this map with Palladio which I display here as a screen shot (due to the limitations in Palladio Miriam Posner describes.)

UNICEF First Map

Although quite tiny and diffuse, and literally wandering off the screen, all the countries are in tact.

I was even more thrilled when I got this map to appear:

UNICEF Second Map

Because it appeared globe-like, I was hoping the coutries were in their global positions. But they’re not because what I discovered is this is just the 2D map starting to shape itself in to other views, which I find fascinating.

I had planned not to do PRAXIS 3 but as I saw everyone’s work unfolding, I really got inspired, particularly by Patrick’s work with Shakespeare and his candor in articulating that he didn’t know what the results of his project might lead to.

I feel similarly because I’m still wrapping my head around the potentialities with Voyant in the fields of study I frequent, and have many “wish list” projects for both text analysis and datavis.

More specific to DH, PRAXIS 3 is showing me how damned hard it is going to be to datavis PREFERENCE, which I knew, but now I’m becoming more psychologically prepared to tackle.

With today being Veteran’s Day, I took inspiration from a Vice News video I saw on Facebook about two hipster Brooklynites who took a year off of work and volunteered to fight Daesh (ISIS) with the Kurdish Army. I thought it was such a cool thing to do, and so my own contribution is a mapping project that illustrates where Daesh held land, where it has control as of most recently, and where it had been eliminated by the US. I realize I am very late with this praxis, however, I had a medical issue when it was due and my other two were on time so this is just for my own benefit.

I used Carto to make my map. I had a hard time figuring out how to make the layers work for me and eventually, it told me I had exceeded my allotted amount and needed to upgrade my account if I wanted more. The reason I had so many layers was that of the purple and orange polygons (which I will explain in a minute the logic of it all) … I was having a hard time adding more than one polygon to one layer, but I eventually got it to work.

Other than that Carto is very intuitive. There is definitely a learning curve that I haven’t quite gotten over entirely, but it was rewarding to play with this tool. The source of my data was a BBC article on the annihilation of Daesh over time (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27838034). I basically just combined two of the different maps they had… one showing Daesh control and another map visualizing where the US destroyed Daesh. I did this very crudely and not all of the towns that were on the BBC map would come up in Carto, even when I searched for al-Qaim it took me to Yemen, which is not the right answer. So I had to guess as best I could. I looked for Daesh related datasets but came up empty-handed. ISIS has a lot of connotations other than the terror organization, so that search too was useless.

So here is the map…

I couldn’t figure out how to embed the image so I just screenshot the entire workstation so anyone not familiar with Carto could see how it is setup. As for a legend of the map, the red dots show US lead coalition strikes against Daesh, there were 13,315 in Iraq and 14,660 in Syria. The purple polygons and one line signify Daesh control of the territory as of Jan 5, 2015 and the orange polygons show their significant loss of control as of Jan 8, 2018.

This was a great way to spend my morning. Seeing the demise of Daesh visualized is very rewarding… and if anyone happens to know those two Brooklynites I referenced earlier please introduce me! The one even talked about reading Hamlet and all of Shakespeare during his deployment. He is a theater designer in real life, just to illustrate his unique personality a bit!