Author: Hubbard

Text (Datasets)

Plain text

 

TEI-Encoded

    • U.S. Presidents’ Inaugural Speeches
    • Abraham Lincoln Speeches and Letters
    • Documenting the American South
      • The Church in the Black Community
      • First-Person Narratives of the American South (African Americans, women, enlisted men, Native Americans, ex-slaves, etc.)
      • North American Slave Narratives
    • Sunday School Books in 19th Century America
    • The Grange Visitor (Michigan newspaper)
    • Historic American Cookbooks
    • Adult British Fiction – 1880s (by gender)
    • Children’s Fiction – 1880s (by gender) (I have formatted some of these data, ask me)
    • William Wordsworth writings
    • Book summaries and film summaries from Wikipedia
    • U.S. patents related to the humanities

 

Text in a Variety of Formats

¶ Week 6: Questions

Please answers both questions below:

1.) The work you are doing on the Digital Watts Project is first and foremost for the Southern California Library. With that in mind, please explain your metadata creation process. In other words, give the library insight into what it takes to do what you did so they may learn from your efforts. Answer questions like: What order did you do things in? How did you decide on titles if the artifact did not already have one? What are your thoughts on the creation and application of subject terms? How much time did it take? How do you know you are done describing an object? What was the most difficult part of the process? Also, please make sure to share which of the class readings where most helpful—be they readings about classification, readings about Watts, etc.—and explain why they were helpful.

2.) The Southern California Library has expressed an interest in allowing library users to tag their digitized objects in order to add more information to them and/ or to described the objects in ways that speak more to their specific perspective or community. Talk about tagging: What is it? What are the benefits? What are the concerns and pitfalls? How does tagging connect with the library’s mission? What is the difference between tagging and the work you have already done? As part of your answer you must suggest at least one possible tagging system they could employ.

¶ Week 5: Question

In the intro to Sorting Things Out, Bowker and Star write about the all-encompassing nature of classification systems, how they shape (and control) our everyday lives and their implications:

Remarkably for such a central part of our lives, we stand for the most part in formal ignorance of the social and moral order created by these invisible, potent entities. Their impact is indisputable, and as Foucault reminds us, inescapable…Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. This is not a bad thing—indeed it is inescapable. But it is an ethical choice, and as such it is dangerous—not bad but dangerous. (3 & 5)

As designers and implementers of a classification system we have taken on an enormous responsibility. We have to consider ethics, the needs of the Southern California Library and the South LA community as well as the needs of researchers not affiliated with the library. What kind of ethical choices are we making and/or what kind of ethical questions should we be asking ourselves? What pitfalls might we find ourselves in, be they ethical or otherwise? What steps need to be taken with this project once you have completed your part? Put another way, you only have so much time on this project. What more might need to be done to improve your work? Consider the fact that we are working to make the materials findable to multiple audiences; seeking to represent materials accurately (Is that possible?); creating a controlled vocabulary and proposing possible tagging systems. 

Your response should be no more than three paragraphs.

¶ Week 4: Question

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the role of gender in the documentary: in both the representation of the riots themselves and the accounts of what caused the riots. Specifically, I’m fascinated by the (non) presence of black women in the representation of the riot and black masculinity as a focal point of discussions of the riot’s causes. In what ways are women an absent presence in the film? What did you see as the overall effect of the manner in which black masculinity, black male role models, and the black family were discussed in the documentary?

¶ Week 4: Question

Address all of the following prompts and please let us know if you have questions:

1.) Yesterday we explored the possibility of repurposing online social networking services (but also online platforms more generally) for academic/scholarly work. We also talked about some of the hazards and limits of these kinds of endeavors.

Consider one of the services we discussed (Twitter) or another service/platform that you are familiar with (Facebook; Genius; Pintrest). (Set aside for the moment blogging services like WordPress and Tumblr). Do these sites/services have any capacities or affordances that could be harnessed for collaborative scholarly work? This could be work that results in permanent content or a permanent archive. Or it could be more ephemeral group work: brainstorming, sharing feedback, workshopping.

Approach this question as a student or a teacher (or both). How would things have to be set up so that it avoids being merely a gimmick (adopting a technology for the sake of it) or butting against some of those very real questions of privacy and the unwelcome blurring of professional/personal boundaries? Alternatively, discuss an online tool/platform that you have used as a teacher or a student that you thought was really successful and explain why it was.

2.) Look over the Twitter feed from #HILT2015. I (Melanie) took a course there last summer. You will need to scroll down a bit to get to the richer parts. Identify what is working in this thread and list a few resources you find useful. Remember, resources can be people. (A single paragraph devoted to this prompt is fine.)

3.) Please share a couple of the sources from your presentation yesterday that you think are particularly insightful.

¶ Week 2: Questions

Required – Do the following after you have written your response:  

a.) Look at the Library of Congress Classifications and determine the category in which your post should go.

b.) Propose 4 keywords that most closely describe your post and search those terms in the Library of Congress Subject Headings database to see if they exist. For terms that are not already there, search for ones that most closely match them. Include both your original keywords and the LC terms in your post.

I realize using the LC is new to you.  Just do your best.

Answer at least one of the following:

1.) Last night’s discussion about Google was rich, intense and touched on a lot of complex issues. One of the many questions it raised for me was, how do you discuss this topic with people who are less literate in informatics, technology, issues of hegemony, etc.? In other words, how do discuss it with most people?

With my question in mind, explain how you as an instructor would present issues of bias in Google and other search engines to either high school students or undergrads. Consider the many layers of complexity that Dr. Noble raises in her article, “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible.” They include: the racist/sexist mindset embedded in algorithm design and the impact that such algorithms have on information findability, the fact that prejudicial content dominates the web, common information seeking behaviors (i.e. only reading the first page of search results), capitalistic interests, long established racist/sexist classification systems, and the illusion of objectivity. How would you break these concepts down and, essentially, translate them to a younger less knowledgeable audience? What basic takeaways would you want them to leave with? It’s hard not to feel cynical after seeing “the man behind the curtain” or The Man behind the Google. How would you handle this with your students? Should they feel cynical or something else? 

2.) Erasure and invisibility are recurring themes in Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and are a central topic in Noble’s “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible.”

Baldwin writes: “The truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions. So every attempt is made to cut that black man down — not only was made yesterday but is made today.” (69)

Noble writes: “At the heart of the public’s general understanding and trust in commercial search engines like Google, is a belief in the neutrality of technology—a technologically deterministic blind spot to the embedded social values in technology design itself—which only obscures our ability to understand the potency of misrepresentation that further marginalizes and renders the interests of Black women, coded as girls, invisible.”

Explore the parallels between their works, i.e. issues concerning hegemony, systems and power. Then discuss the similarities and differences in the way they address these issues. Are they essentially making the same argument? Or are there fundamental differences? How might Noble’s argument be the “today” of which Baldwin speaks?

 

 

¶ Week 1: Questions

1.) There has been a lot of talk recently about “slow” movements: the slow food movement; slow scholarship; the slow professor; the slow university. At a distance from these discourses lies Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” (see Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor). While Nixon is focused on environmental projects and disasters (Bhopal etc.), I kept thinking of the concept as I read Wanda Coleman (and listened to Anthony and Kevin). One of the challenges of responding politically to or organizing to address the negative developments that occur in neighborhoods and communities is that they often occur slowly and incrementally (and thus, in some ways, invisibly). And one of the most effective aspects of Coleman’s narrative is the way she reminds us of the obvious (but often forgotten) fact that large-scale historical events and developments are often experienced, as if, in slow motion as lives slowly unravel. What struck you about the way she weaves together the story of a neighborhood, a community, and her own life story? Are there some early lessons from her story and from the stories of Anthony and Kevin (though very different) that we might adopt provisionally as protocols/adages to inform our work on this project?

2.) “For me, narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of the present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence” (Hartman 4). I am fascinated by this aspect of Saidiya Hartman’s project: linking a “counter history” in a more or less distant past to a “history of the present.” Intuitively, this feels like what we should be striving for in the long term if our work with the Watts material eventually takes shape as a history. But did you get any sense from Hartman’s essay of how that might work? 

3.) Coleman references magazines with articles on Emmett Till1, a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Money, Mississippi in 1955. She writes, “Photographs of his corpse, in state, and the lines of hundreds of mourners, appeared in either Ebony or Jet magazine or both” (Coleman 251). One of the articles to which she refers was published in the September 15, 1955 issue of Jet. Read the Jet article2 and its New York Times equivalent (also view the full page) then consider Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts.” As historical documents, how does the Jet article act as a “counter history” to the Times article?

1. Hartman also mentions Till. See the second paragraph on page 4.
2. The article begins on page 6. Be prepared, the imagery is very upsetting.

Just as a point of interest, take a look at Jet page 14. You will make a timely discovery.

Please let us know if you have any questions about the prompt. -Dermot and Melanie