{"id":5156,"date":"2017-07-05T16:03:04","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T21:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/?p=5156"},"modified":"2017-07-06T13:17:58","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T18:17:58","slug":"making-data-fit-what-digital-repackaging-can-do-for-the-humanities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/2017\/07\/05\/making-data-fit-what-digital-repackaging-can-do-for-the-humanities\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Data Fit: What Digital Repackaging Can Do for the Humanities"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent years, digital humanists have been at the forefront of challenging data\u2019s supposed neutrality.\u00a0 Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson have suggested that the discourse of objectivity that often surrounds conversations about data-drive research is not only reductive, but also unlikely to encourage future scholarship and more rigorous debate.\u00a0 They suggest instead that data be thought of as \u201csituated and historically specific,\u201d and that we recognize that \u201cit comes from somewhere and is the result of ongoing changes to . . . conditions that are at once material, social, and ethical\u201d (4).\u00a0 Indeed, just as words encode strings of meaning which can be ambiguous and open to interpretation, so too are numbers and databases invested with a rhetorical significance that must be tested and scrutinized.\u00a0 Information and the means by which it is assembled, organized, and presented must not be thought of in terms of self-evidence or a set of givens; rather, knowledge and the methods by which it is retrieved and made accessible should be open to interpretation.<\/p>\n

Only recently have scholars begun to seriously explore the assumptions embedded in data visualization and graphical display.\u00a0 Johanna Drucker invites digital humanists to \u201ctake on the challenge of developing graphical expressions rooted in and appropriate to interpretative activity.\u201d She takes issue with \u201crealist\u201d models of data visualization which appear to be motivated by the assumption that graphical displays and user interfaces show the phenomenon itself, rather than an interpretable representation of it.\u00a0 \u201cData,\u201d she writes, \u201cpass themselves off as mere descriptions of a priori conditions,\u201d in turn foreclosing important discussions of ambiguity and uncertainty that could open up meaningful scholarly debate.\u00a0 Writing in 2011, Drucker felt that data visualizations concealed the very phenomena they were meant to expose.\u00a0 Meaningful insights were hidden behind an apparently \u201cobjective\u201d digital representation, and more than five years later, I am left wondering the extent to which scholars of the digital have seriously confronted these problems.<\/p>\n

At the same time, I\u2019m equally interested in thinking about what existing visualizations can reveal about my own data.\u00a0 Rather than build a project from the ground up, how can I leverage, hijack, or appropriate the already-important work done by others in an effort to make it \u201cfit\u201d with my own data.\u00a0 Of course, such an open source or peer-to-peer mentality depends upon a number of important factors, not least among them being the ability to negotiate permissions for modifying someone else\u2019s code.\u00a0 If all goes to plan, though, fitting data into existing visualizations can actually reveal unknowns without sacrificing the kind of interrogations Drucker images as being so essential to Digital Humanities Scholarship.\u00a0 At the very least, it has taught me how to creatively redeploy existing technologies and manipulate graphical representations for my own ends.<\/p>\n

My project, Mapping Whitman\u2019s Correspondence<\/em>, is in many ways concerned with visualizing Whitman\u2019s social network as it emerged in place and time.\u00a0 Importantly, the code I used to animate the trajectory of sent and received messages was adapted from a radically different project motivated by very different research objectives.\u00a0 University of Iowa professor Caglar Koylu actually wrote the code as part of his own scholarship on immigration patterns in Europe and the United States, and he was gracious enough to allow me to tinker with it in order to see what the code might reveal about my own data.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Messages sent by Whitman are represented by a blue line. Other correspondents are represented by a red line.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While my initial prototype utilized geocoding methods in order to visualize the flow of letters, much important information was nevertheless lost in the process.\u00a0 The correspondents themselves are most obviously absent from the visualization, and more nuanced data like the content of the letters, as well as frequent topics of conversation, were subordinated to an aesthetically pleasing though informationally limited animation.<\/p>\n

Only recently have I started to focus more of my attention on thematic concerns, such as the often unacknowledged intersection of the poet\u2019s public and private writing activity.\u00a0 What types of connections would I find between his letters and his most famous work, like Leaves of Grass<\/em>.\u00a0 Are the boundaries separating public and private as rigidly maintained as we often believe?\u00a0 To explore these questions further, I began identifying all letters which contained references to Whitman\u2019s poetry, prose, or journalistic activity.\u00a0 The more I worked with these documents, and the more I sensed the interconnections between them, it became clear to me that a more interactive interface was essential for helping users navigate the often overwhelming amount of data contained within the correspondence network.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
This original source code for this visualization was developed by Chris Willard. You can see it here: http:\/\/www.findtheconversation.com\/. \u00a0Also, Aengus Anderson comments on the strengths and limitations of the concept map: http:\/\/www.findtheconversation.com\/overhauled\/. \u00a0Though I preserved the “binary nodes” for Whitman’s male correspondents, there is no intentional connection between individual writers. \u00a0Future iterations will experiment with these groupings.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I opted for what\u2019s known as a concept map. \u00a0In this iteration, the object consists of three parts: a table of \u201cnames\u201d in the center, a list of \u201cthemes\u201d on the left, and a cluster of \u201cperspectives\u201d on the right.\u00a0 Initially, I positioned individual correspondents in the middle, and the nodes which extended on either side contained references to Whitman\u2019s writings.\u00a0 At first, this made the most sense to me in that the project is about<\/em> the correspondence, so why not highlight the actual writers by situating them in the center of the \u201cmap.\u201d\u00a0 After having met with digital humanities librarian Stephanie Blalock, though, it became clear to me that, while useful, what I had proposed was essentially a glorified finding aid.\u00a0 For example, users could very easily see what Whitman\u2019s doctor friend, Richard Maurice Bucke, was most interested in talking about, but such discoveries revealed little else about the correspondence network.<\/p>\n

What if I changed things up a bit?\u00a0 What would the concept map look like if I foregrounded gender as opposed to individual writers?\u00a0 What could this reveal about the nature of Whitman\u2019s correspondence?\u00a0 Not only that, but what could this reveal about archival practice more generally, a potentially generative inquiry seeing as how all of my data is assembled from The Walt Whitman Archive<\/em>.\u00a0 Perhaps I could begin to make inferences about the gendered nature of archival research, curation, and preservation in Whitman studies.<\/p>\n

In the image above, you can see that I repositioned \u201cthemes\u201d and \u201cperspectives\u201d in the middle of the map, with female correspondents now located on the left, and male correspondents on the right.\u00a0 While informative, doing so is not without its problems, and it is here where I return to Drucker\u2019s observation regarding the assumptions embedded in visualizations themselves.\u00a0 Indeed, while the concept map does inherently preserve the notion of gender as a binary construct, it is also useful for conceptualizing the gendered identities that undergird epistolary activity.\u00a0 But whereas Drucker might consider digital repackaging to be fundamentally \u201cat odds with humanistic method[s]\u201d of interpretation and analysis, I see it as opening a dialogue where none might otherwise exist.\u00a0 If, as I believe, Whitman\u2019s poetry and prose can be thought of as existing within a shared network of public and private activity, then it is important to consider the ways in which factors such as race, gender, and class contribute to such production.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Drucker, Johanna.\u00a0 \u201cHumanities Approaches to Graphical Display.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Digital Humanities<\/em> Quarterly<\/em>, vol.<\/p>\n

5, no. 1, 2011.\u00a0 Web.\u00a0 3 July 2017.<\/p>\n

Gitelman, Lisa and Virginia Jackson.\u00a0 \u201cIntroduction.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u201cRaw Data\u201d Is an Oxymoron<\/em>.\u00a0Cambridge: MIT<\/p>\n

Press, 2013, pp. 1-14.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In recent years, digital humanists have been at the forefront of challenging data\u2019s supposed neutrality.\u00a0 Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson have suggested that the discourse of objectivity that often surrounds conversations about data-drive research is not only reductive, but also unlikely to encourage future scholarship and more rigorous debate.\u00a0 They suggest instead that data beContinue reading “Making Data Fit: What Digital Repackaging Can Do for the Humanities”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,32],"tags":[33,34],"syndication":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5156"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5189,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156\/revisions\/5189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5156"},{"taxonomy":"syndication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/syndication?post=5156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}