Author: Gabe

1.      I found the metadata creation portion of this project to be a mostly straightforward task that did not take up too much time. When approaching an item, I put in a title of the largest print phrase at the top of the item. Sometimes this was a clear headline, like for a newspaper article (“How Hot is Watts?), but at times that was just the letterhead of the group publishing or sharing the item (“Committee for the Defense of Philip Bentley Brooks”). In writing a description for an item, I tried to summarize the overall purpose and message and mention as many individual subtopics that were listed as possible. With regards to subject terms, two parts of that process were helpful and necessary in generating consistent subject terms across all of our work. We brainstormed different subject terms on a shared spreadsheet and then reviewed them. Then, after filling out descriptions and titles and applying subject terms to items in our individual excel sheets (which served as rough drafts before we uploaded our metadata to Omeka), we reviewed the items we labeled and edited them together. This was really helpful in establishing a uniform methodology with different items. Generating and accurately, concisely applying subject terms was the most difficult part of this process, but the method of group editing made them much more clear and focused.
      As for the readings in the class, I found the excerpt from Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web to be excellent context for the immediate actions of the metadata creation process. The articles from Saidiya Hartman and Safiya Coleman were extremely helpful for establishing the importance of archives and especially digital archives in the face of the silencing of counternarratives in the age of Google and throughout history. Gerald Horne’s The Fire This Time was immensely important for understanding the context and details of Watts 1965. James Baldwin and Ta-nehisi Coates’s works, the most impactful works in the course for me, were important for placing the Digital Watts project within the black community in America’s larger struggles for authentic representation and self-identity within an Anglocentric mainstream culture. For me, this last piece helped bring perspective to the ultimate goal of shifting public perceptions about Watts and other black communities in some minute way.

2.     Tagging is a process by which users can provide more information or feedback regarding a digital item which makes it searchable or connected to other digital items with a tag, much like a #hashtag on Twitter. Tags by public users most often provide descriptions of what the item is about or what it relates to (events, places, topics, etc.). The benefits of this system are that it provides users the power and freedom to mark, label, and connect items within the archive, much like retweeting, reposting, or commenting on an item on Twitter or Facebook.  This can create an engaged conversation among users about digital archive items and how they relate to our world today. The drawback of this functionality is that there are no established limits or methodology to guide users in how they tag items. Open tagging among users can sometimes lead to a glut of metadata that is less than useful, overly general, or misleading for other users. In reviewing other platforms with open-to-all-users tagging like Nines.org, an online database for nineteenth century scholarship, we noticed that tags were sometimes overly general (“England”) or cryptic (“cruikshank”), which could sometimes lead to cluttered design and confusion on the part of a user trying to navigate items on the site. In opening up the archive to tagging, the SCL can absolutely advance its mission of giving the community access to archival texts and a means to organize and analyze items, and make this archive more relevant to their own experience. The SCL should just weigh the exciting possibilities for further engagement with the community against the ways in which open source programming design like this can make for a messier interface for users. Of course, as with any kind of community engagement, the messiness is often an essential part of the process when facilitating authentic communications amongst a large group of people.
      One system we read about that I think could work for the SCL’s digital archive is the combination of these user-generated tags and administrator-generated controlled vocabularies. The subject headings we developed through group brainstorming and peer review (which in this case can be considered a “controlled vocabulary” because they were vetted by a group) can stand alone as ways to guide content (examples include: ‘Los Angeles Police Department” and “Community Engagement”), but users can also add their own tags, which offers a way for them to organize and structure content on the website that makes the most sense to them. This way, users of the site can navigate items via subject headings developed by staff or volunteers in a controlled environment, a generally more tidy, clear system, or tags created by users, which can be more representative of the vernacular or interests of a larger set of public users.

     In the December 1965 CBS News Documentary, “Watts – Riots or Revolt?” the absence of black (or white) women reveals the lens with which the producers of the show view the events in Watts and their cause. Through on-air interviews almost exclusively with black men, the documentary contextualizes the Watts community through concerns about masculinity as the foundation of a civil society. The lone interview with a female Watts resident occurs very briefly when Governor Brown speaks to a mother of four about the welfare benefits she receives. The first question he’s shown asking in the clip is “What does your husband do?” She then asserts that she’s caring for the family without a husband and she’d gladly work if she could get a job that could allow her to pay for child care. The clip abruptly cuts to a man standing nearby directing his concerns at the governor, and the issue of employment for Watts women is not discussed again, nor are any female Watts community leaders interviewed within the hour. The presumption from the Governor’s question seems to be that the absence of a male ‘breadwinner’ is at the heart of this woman’s difficulties.
      As Gerald Horne points out, black leaders from the 1930s and 40s, like one of the few female community leaders we read about in Charlotta Bass, had been undercut and severed from Watts by the 1960s, but NOI and other cultural nationalist groups are also noticeably absent from the documentary. Women are largely silenced and absent: I saw two quick shots of a woman looking frightened with her hands up when police have pulled her and others out of the car and another woman whom police told to drop her purse before raising her hands, but neither woman is not heard. Also noticeably silent and absent are any legitimized depictions of black masculinity in contrast to the straight-laced, suit-and-tie, hyperrational masculinity exemplified by the host, Bill Stout. The frustrated mother of four is the only black women heard, and all black men interviewed are either community leaders, academics, and the lone journalist Robert Richardson, and all of these men conform to this narrow conception of a civil, “refined,” almost academic masculinity in dress shirts and pants, mostly in suits and ties. Black men shown are largely either community leaders calling for nonviolence and to keep the streets clear (like Martin Luther King and H.H. Brookins, the reverend who runs the chaotic community meeting in which the boy calls for the riots to continue in white neighborhoods and then speaks to the interviewers after a meeting with the deputy police chief), or, in contrast, individual black men without formal dress expressing largely impotent resentment and frustration (like the man who yearns for the television and other possessions people outside his community possess) or all out hatred bred from petty grievances (like the unidentified young man who describes how he firebombed different stores and hates the Jewish store owners on the block).
      The Watts community is depicted as either civil, rational men who mostly dress and speak like the host, or as disenfranchised, frustrated individual men who lack this agency granted by formal dress and speech. Even those who speak for the community compassionately, like Robert Richardson and the young Rhodes Scholar in law school, still appear in more formal dress to represent and explain the difficulties of their community (with Richardson calling out the only example of disrespect toward black women in Watts with his comment about housewives being mistaken for whores by police). No legitimate black nationalist, class-conscious, or feminist viewpoints are represented, only that of Daniel Moynihan, the white asst. Secretary of Labor who asserts that the “great humiliation of Jim Crow was a brutal assault on the personal integrity of the Negro male,” who took “the brunt of” this humiliation. Moynihan is given the most screen time of anyone other than Police Chief Parker, and his assertion about the economic frustration of the Watts community being felt principly as an emasculation of black men permeates the structure and voices represented in the documentary.

Library of Congress Category: Information Resources, subclass ZA – either Information Superhighway (!), Electronic Information Resources, or Computer Network Resources

Library of Congress Subject Headings:
suggested: search engines, hegemony, neo-liberalism, computer algorithms (all 4 found!)

Here’s my lesson plan/outline for presenting some of Dr. Noble’s work with Google as a tool of hegemonic oppression, especially in the visibility of young Black women. Much of how I structured it was based on Dr. Noble’s talk, but more simplified and with more verbal and written prompts for student participation, which I find to be a little more compatible with the high school classroom.

I. Hook/Intro – Start with brainstorm (silently jot down responses/ideas in your notes):
        A. How has Google search changed our lives for the better? After a few minutes, field student responses (examples will probably include “easier access to information,” “satisfies curiosity” “more convenience, better planning in day-to-day concerns)
        B. How could Google search be having some sort of negative effect on people? What are the drawbacks to its ubiquity in our current culture? And, just like in A, field student responses (examples could include “we’re becoming more reliant on it for basic facts,” “we’re more and more likely to just skim things, look for simpler answers,” or something with Google’s commercial interests)

II. There are several things we don’t see/think about with Google, (much of which I hadn’t thought about before reading Dr. Noble’s article and seeing her presentation, so these are new concepts for me, as well).
        A. They’re a private company whose net worth was estimated at $82.5 billion. How is this revenue generated if the majority of Google’s top features (search, mail, etc.) are free? (field some guesses).
        B.  Google is a commercial search site run by a private company, not a public resource. Revenue is generated from targeted ads, particularly the ones at the side of our your search (show example with a harmless, generic Google search). As Dr. Noble points out, you are Google’s product, not their consumer.
             i. Are you familiar with the term ‘clickbait?” (Students explain/define the term, provide examples of clickbait headlines like “A policeman and a young black boy meet in the street. You won’t believe what happens next…”.) What’s the objective with these dumb headlines and articles? They generate revenue off of your web traffic, whether you were satisfied or not with the article itself.
             ii. Google search works in a similar way. The top results displayed are not the most popular, relevant, or authoritative sites, they’re the most commercially viable for Google.
                  a. This can undermine our belief in a ‘digital democracy,’ the belief that the internet, largely interfaced by search engines, almost exclusively Google at this point, can grant equal access to any content via search, privileging, just like a democratic system of government, only the content that is most popular, as measured by site ‘hits’ in this case.
                 b. In fact, results are sorted by vastly complex algorithms, which sort and list sites according to many, many different factors, in which site hits are just one.

        C. Google’s search engine is not a neutral tool. It reflects the biases, conscious and unconscious, of the engineers and other employees at Google who design these algorithms that make it run.
             i. To put it another way, see a quote from Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book “The Googlization of Everything” quoted in Dr. Noble’s article, “Rendering web content (pages) findable via search engines is an expressly social, economic, and human project”
             ii. We’ll examine the “N**** House” example from DeRay McKesson’s  tweet and we’ll listen to a clip from the NPR piece we listened to last week.
             iii. These are not glitches, they’re related to the demographic makeup of the engineers that design the algorithms. Look at this chart of info about Google’s tech employees in particular: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workforce-diversity-data-good/ (83% male, 60% White, 3% Black and Latino). How can these statistics show that these “glitches” are not outliers? How can these gender and racial breakdowns lead to problems like the ones we just saw? (Implicit, unconscious bias, no one in the room to speak up/examine how these algorithms can have negative impact or examine the potential bias they would propagate)
              iv. This kind of problem is not unique to Google or engineers. It happens in all seats of influence when leaders are not demographically representative of the public they serve or  interface with.
                  a. Briefly discuss women’s bathrooms in congress chambers: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2011/07/house-womens-bathroom-congress-/1#.V0sJVPkrLIU How do female members of congress not get their own bathroom until 1993 (when there were 55 of them, over 10% of the House) and not get it expanded to 4 (4!) stalls until 2011, when there were 96 of them, close to 20%? When women are underrepresented in this body, commonsense problems like this get overlooked.

        D. Google search results, just like other media images, can affect our worldviews, especially regarding disenfranchised groups.
            i. What images pop into your mind when you think of the word ‘beautiful?’ (jot down examples, share: sunset on the beach? Yosemite?) Then compare to Google image search. What impact will these results have on young people (girls AND boys)? Field student responses.
            ii. Do the same with the “black girls” search (with much of the content censored out for a high school classroom, of course). Discuss the impact of these search results on young Black women looking to find themselves represented, congregated on the internet, perhaps looking for feminism or empowerment, but they don’t have that vocabulary yet. Note, discuss the fact that the vast majority of us (show of hands in the room, mine included) don’t venture past the first search result page on Google.
            ii. Note that Google, of course, does not create these social inequalities, but it does perpetuate and over represent them within our society at large. Read them this quote included in Dr. Noble’s article: “Search technologies themselves and their design do not dictate racial ideologies; rather, they both reflect and re-instantiate the current social climate and prevailing social and cultural values. As users engage with technologies like search engines, they dynamically co-construct content within the technology itself.”(Christian Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet,” The Information Society, emphasis mine”). Discuss last part, how do we “co-construct” content on the internet? (clicks perpetuate more content like it, vicious circle of revenue and marketing)
            a. If these search results are put forth as the dominant narrative about young black girls, other critical voices and ideologies are rendered invisible, as well as the suppression of these other views.

III. So what can we do about this? Brainstorm concrete actions to combat these suppressions and propagations of biases with your partner. Share some with the group (Ideas could include: start a petition to pressure Google into making algorithms public/hiring more diverse staff of engineers along gender/racial lines, emphasizing noncommercial alternatives to search engines for finding information about underrepresented groups,  increasing public awareness about how Google’s invisible commercials interests affect results)
        A. Shock, discouraged, disillusioned by this context and the “man behind the curtain?” Remember, Google is private company, and reinforcing biases through product marketing is the driving force of their search engine business model (when trying to locate revenue and profit margins and revenue for just Google’s search engine, I was unable to pin down numbers on this as Google works very hard to keep these statistics hidden from the public view. The first three articles that come up in the search “Google search engine profits compared to other divisions” just discuss how Google is dominating the market over Bing and Yahoo https://www.ventureharbour.com/visualising-size-google-bing-yahoo/).
            i. Even if we don’t have concrete solutions YET, awareness and skepticism is the first step even as we engage with this technology**. All this information is new to me, too. I’m not sure what’s the best path forward in my own conscientious consumption of Google products, but it’s important to ask these questions of the largest corporations in our lives and of ourselves as daily consumers of these products.
            ii. Exit Slip (a few sentences, turn in response as you leave): What’s the one aspect of today’s talk that impacted you most and why? How might you use Google search or view your Google search results differently moving forward?

**Full disclosure: my high school is heavily invested in Google products. Every student has a Google run email, since the company provide free email servers to any school that chooses to use them. Every student is enrolled in at least one class that uses Google Classroom, an online class management and homework submission system with a blog-style interface very similar to our Digital Humanities WordPress. All the computers in our three mobile computer labs are Google Chromebooks (the 12 in the library are Google Chromebox desktops), and we’ve partnered with them in our 1-to-1 computing initiative started this year. By 2018, all enrolled students will be using their own Google Chromebooks in class daily.