Bruce Springsteen's America

From Randolph Street to Balboa Park - Bruce Springsteen's America: a mapping project based on Bruce Springsteen lyrics and places.

Blog Post #5- Exploring a Mapping/GIS project

First I used Myths on Maps (btw: The PLS speed dial has an image which says  “Mapping Texts: Texas Historical Newspapers" but it links to Myths on Maps.)

It took me a little bit to figure out how to navigate it in useful way, since it doesn’t link to the home page explaining how to navigate but instead takes you right to the map tool. Myths on Maps uses the texts of Apollodorus’ Library and Epitome and locates character names and sites onto a Google map. It has different view/search options- you can read directly through the text which has hyperlinks to the map tool, or you can use the map itself and search by location (ex: Thebes) and then use the sidebar to see characters, events and text citations.  It was a little buggy and there were lots of error pages but it was pretty great. I could see how this would be useful if you were teaching with these texts as it gives a good sense of the geographic area of the Greek Myths, in a way that seems “real” today. The project was made at the University of Victoria, and since it’s an academic source and so closely linked to a fixed text, it would seem to me pretty reliable and responsibly curated.

Screensnap from Myths and Maps, search term: Thebes

 I also tried Google Sightsmap, which uses crowd-sourced photos and locates them using a photo's metadata onto a google map. The data is based on photos from Panoramio, a geolocation based photo sharing service. The Sightsmap lets you see how “hot” a place is based on the amount of photos that have been taken and uploaded at certain places. It uses the basic Googlemap format so you can scroll to zoom in and move around, and the more you zoom in, the more information and actual user photos you see, you also have the option to show tags in a wordcloud so you can see what people are saying. Below are some screensnaps showing the different options for Alexandria, Egypt. There is an instant pleasure factor with this site, even if you are just browsing without intention.

Sightsmap was simultaneously really cool, really banal and really creepy. Cool because it’s fun and I did spend a lot of time looking at things, banal because pretty much everyone takes pictures of the same things in certain places, and creepy because it’s yet another example of free labor provided by users when they sign up and agree to Panoramia’s terms of service.

I think Sightsmap would be really engaging for students, and could be used as a prompt for many creative activities, and could also bring up an interesting conversation about being mindful of what we provide and control when exchanging our information/data for free.

Screensnap from Google Sightsmap

tag based word cloud

showing a closer zoom, individual user photos appear

Example of a typical user photo for the Alexandria Library

Here was one photo where a user actually went inside the library. 

Revised Project (thank you for the feedback!)

Project: Student-made virtual tours of accidental art*.

Students will design/curate their own annotated virtual tour based on mindful, visual observation based on the elements of art in their environments.

Steps:

1. Learn to make a Google map virtual tour myself. Find out if you can link to blogger posts in the map markers.

2. Prepare instructions for students.

3. Model the tour based on an assignment they already did in week 1, which was to post a picture/write about of where they saw art in their daily life (examples that the posted include graffiti on a deli, a mosaic in the subway, at their gym, at a food bank). I can make the tour based on what they posted, then we can look a it together as an example of how their own tours will look.

4. Have students over the course of 2 weeks take 6 (or more) pictures of their encounters with accidental art. The parameters will be based on the visual elements we discussed in class- line, pattern, shape, color relationships, light, texture.

5. Upload pictures to class blog of the work and where they saw it. Give the work a title, and write a description of the medium, elements that made it accidental art, the site, date, whether it’s ephemeral or permanent, other relevant work info/description.

6. Using Google maps, create a virtual tour with images, short descriptions and links to the blog posts.

7. Use the project as part of my presentation at a conference (acceptance pending.)

*Accidental art/Found art examples can be seen here: Joy Garnett and Horny For Cables

Blog Post #4 - Seminar Project Planning

What I’m thinking about is to make a student driven/student centric tagged map. There are two options I’m thinking of for the content of the maps:

#1 is to do a map of where students see art around them in their daily lives- in their neighborhood, at school, during their commute, etc. (This is based on a writing assignment I give in Art & Society class, where students have to find, photograph, discuss the work/location.) I thought this would be a good activity because they’re already using blogger and images and maybe that would be a good connection (since I think the Google maps can be easily linked to blog posts?)

Pros: it’s an activity I can replicate each semester and possibly with more classes, therefore having a greater number of students use DH tools; the material would be easy to gather since it’s already an existing assignment; it’s something doable in the PLS timeframe. Cons: ? (I can’t think of any.)

#2 is inspired by the way I see common spaces used at LaGuardia, and how physical spaces can dictate student behaviors. For example the “Sun Room” space between E an M is always crowded- but very quiet. Students are usually laying down or spacing out or reading- it’s really, really awesome. The physical space just suggests meditative time. Compare that with the courtyard outside of the poolside café, (the concrete platform/stage) where students are always doing more performative things. Compare that with the window ledges in the 1^st floor E Bldg where its kind of raucous and more animated- and a real fashion show of styles.

I think it would be cool if there was a student Guide to campus based on student driven categories- like where’s the best place to study, where’s the best place to people watch, where’s the best place to sleep, which cafeteria is best for what and when, etc. What would students tell each other about these places?

Pros: As a commuter campus, the map could give more of sense of campus life, community, and expose students to new places/people that they normally wouldn’t interact with. Example: I had no idea that we had a designated space for meditation/reflection in Bldg. C because I hardly ever had to go to C bldg. (Wonder what I am missing in the B bldg??!!) Cons: it’s ambitious and probably couldn’t be done in the time frame. Maybe I can just start with E and M bldgs? Not sure. Also, I remember reading that one of Dr. Doctor’s PTK students had made a LaGuardia app? Not sure what that includes but maybe some of these ideas have already been addressed there.

I downloaded and have been messing around with the Google earth tools- I think it seems like making a “sightseeing” Tour would be the logical choice. I think that could be the best way to visualize either of these ideas, by adding markers/tags and images/video to the tour.

(and then there is the third option which is to continue the obituary projects into something larger- I had a lot of good feedback on it so that was encouraging to develop it further- but whether that’s appropriate for the PLS I’m not sure since it’s not student based.)

I'd love to hear your feedback on any of these ideas.

Blog Post #3- Exploring Text Visualization Tools

People kept dying in February!

One of them was artist Nancy Holt, and after reading about her life/death in the Times, it got me wondering about the language of obituaries. So for my blog post #3, I compared a dozen women’s and men’s obituaries in the NY Times, using Wordle and Voyant- which was much more interesting!

First the issues- it’s hard to compare people- it’s subjective, arbitrary- so I tried to find pairs that would be the most like comparing apples to apples. 

Like: same profession, similar length of life, comparable volume of output/influence, similar kinds of work, similar institutional/popular recognition, generally recognized on an equal level and similar length of obituary. I also tried to get relatively recent obituaries- except for Georgia O’Keeffe (1986) and Clement Greenberg (1994)- most (the other 10) are from the past decade.

I KNOW, that’s pretty shaky ground to start on-but I was having fun with the idea and wanted to use the tools to see what I could see in the texts.

First I did them one at a time- one man, one woman- and these were the pairing categories:

Earthwork/Land Art artists: Nancy Holt and Walter De Maria

Big famous artists whose work appears on mugs and totebags:  Georgia O’Keefe and Robert Rauschenberg

Big famous artists who aren’t average kitchen table names: Louise Bourgeois and Cy Twombly

Big famous people you read in art theory class: Susan Sontag and Stuart Hall

Big famous critics: Ada Huxtable and Clement Greenberg,

Big famous Nobel Prize winning writers: Doris Lessing and Seamus Heaney. (Here I wanted to do poet vs poet –(Wislawa Szymborska) but thought maybe it’s better to compare English language literature since it’s an English Language newspaper??)

These are the results from a few individual comparisons in Wordle: 

Nancy Holt and Walter De Maria:

Doris Lessing and Seamus Heaney: 

Susan Sontag and Stuart Hall:

Then I did them all together:

Women: Doris Lessing, Ada Louise Huxtable, Nancy Holt, Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O’Keefe, Susan Sontag

Men: Seamus Heaney, Clement Greenberg, Walter De Maria,  Cy Twombly,  Robert Rauschenberg, Stuart Hall

I also put them in Voyant tools because I wanted to compare how many action words/verbs were in the pairings, but found Voyant hard to use in that respect. I was able to get word counts for each word, but found it hard to select a grouping of words (like “made, wrote, said” all together) because the texts were long and the panel called Frequencies Word Corpus seems to only allow one page at a time (?)

So I tried it a little bit differently. I put in the words “work” and “works” for a few one on one comparisons. Here are the results.

The word work(s) in obituaries of Nancy Holt and Walter DeMaria- her obit is shorter, but more mentions of work/works- but if you count earthworks, he has a few more.

The word work(s) in obituaries of Doris Lessing and Seamus Heaney- her obit is longer, but with fewer mentions of work.

Then, there was this- a big difference in occurance of the word work(s) in obituaries of Louise Bourgeois and Cy Twombly: 

 

Next, I put all the Women’s obituaries together and all the Men’s obituaries together, creating a larger corpus, and did the same search- there was a noticeable difference, even though the total word counts were relatively similar. 
Women Total word count: 10,228; work(s) mentioned:34 
Men Total word count: 10,405; work(s) mentioned: 57

I think what I learned here is that the corpus has to be big to really see patterns evolve. It would be great to do this on a really large scale, to see if the same patterns would get larger. (Reinforces the Moretti article.)

In terms of students doing this: This was fun to do, there’s a visual pleasure right away with Wordle, but to get a little deeper, with Voyant, took time and effort and also a deep curiosity on my part. I think you have dedicate time to learn how to use the tools and start out with a good question- a question that leads to more questions. I think students would have to use material they are deeply interested in to start the process of a committed exploration- and then see all the possibilities of looking at the data from different angles.

PS: I also tried Docuburst, but I’m not exactly sure how to read these results accurately. 

Data Visualization is Fun?

Somewhat related to the Moretti article I read, here is a link to a fun sight of data visualizations gone wrong.

Blog Post #2- Challenges and Opportunites in the DH

The Moretti article presents the idea of using graphs to trace the rise of the novel in a few different cultures (mostly European) and discusses how the graph data has been used correctly or incorrectly for various interpretations. He discusses how literary criticism- which has not really had a use for quantitative analytics- could be enhanced and effected by incorporating this type of data. He starts out by saying the traditional models of literary analysis (comparing it to older methods of historical research) focused on exceptional events as the primary area of focus, but Moretti is suggesting that is all the other stuff- the not so extraordinary, the everyday and mass data- can be even more useful. In this he is suggesting an opportunity for better, deeper understanding.

He describes the benefit of big data/graphs: “… a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn’t a sum of individual cases: it’s a collective system, that should be  grasped as such, as a whole—and the graphs that follow are one way to begin doing this.”

What he is suggesting is that there is a greater value in looking at larger data sets, rather than isolated incidents-more macro than micro- because the larger data can reveal patterns and systems which are likely to be more useful and accurate in research.

He also (importantly) mentions that the gathering of such data is a collective and shared effort, and that the scope of this kind of research benefits from collaborations since results can be combined in multiple ways.

He supports his ideas by examining the how rise and falls of genre novels can be overlayed on the more general “rise of the novel” measures, and also how other factors (politics, generational shifts, trends) can affect the preliminary assumptions.

Because the new scholarship he is discussing are graphs, I don’t see him as blowing up any ivory towers. I can’t see any traditional humanities scholar being horrified by this- it’s really just looking at the same information (the rise of the novel) with fresh eyes (quantitative graphs)- taking into consideration other relevant information. I would hope that a traditional humanist would see it as an enhancement rather than a threat to traditional scholarship.

I think students would be very receptive to multiple ways of analysis- especially the ones with visualizations, but I think it’s important to have them stand in relationship to other sources. Data is most useful when viewed through multiple contexts. For example: English books imported in India as a graph relates one thing. Considering other data like information of the political climate, the cost of paper at the time, even sailing data patterns etc., changes the way we would read the data.

A graph, although we like to think of them as neutral or unbiased is so open to interpretation, if it’s isolated as a singular source. As pointed out in the article, It’s the layering of information gathered by the graphs that provides a real understanding.