Author Archives: Joanne Ramadani

Freedom of Speech* Group Project Update 4/25

After a fairly hectic few weeks, everything seems to be coming together! Group-wise, we’ve been communicating consistently via our Discord server, and Eva and I have been working on putting our code scaffolding into practice. So far, we’ve built out the skeleton and matched our site design to Kevin’s fantastic designs, which the whole group has been actively suggesting minor tweaks to in order to match our project’s goal of providing information on the boundaries of freedom of speech in a clear and accessible way.

The topic model is essential to our functional website, so Martin is doing a manual quality check on the resulting dataset to understand if our predicted threshold would be viable for determining if a case falls into a certain topic. The template question that’s being asked in investigating the threshold for a topic is “Does the topic in question accurately reflect the case’s content at a 25% threshold?” and we will replace the percentage with any percentage that is needed in order to do this in the most accurate way possible. Thankfully, the topics have been super clear since Eva removed common judicial stop words, so hopefully this goes well!

Development-wise, we’ve been trying to have fun with putting everything together. Eva and I have been sharing work in progress screenshots of things that go horrifically wrong during coding (in a way that is hilarious and can be fixed in two minutes) and, of course, memeing about it.

A picture of a large, hand-drawn map of the US with a smaller, computer-generated map of the US beneath it. user eva_sibinga replies,

An image comparing a website to a high fidelity mock-up. The mockup is very detailed and looks complete, while the website looks simple and is in progress. The caption reads "you vs the guy she told you not to worry about"

The great thing about having designs done is that putting the skeleton together for a site becomes much easier. The most work is definitely in assembling the logic that we’ll need in order for everything to flow correctly according to our prototypes.

In terms of design, as noted, Kevin’s made some cosmetic tweaks after our group meeting to make major revisions, and everything looks great! We added Alaska and Hawaii to our map and changed a few things like buttons and colors, and those things are super easy to tweak in our code.

The schedule we set at the beginning of the semester is relatively blank, but internally, we’ve set deadlines for ourselves and we’re aiming for complete rather than perfect. We, of course, want the project to be as good as possible, but to get a little pretentious, the root of perfection is completion.

Some things that we’re actively working on include:

  • The code for the website
  • Finishing touches on data
  • Web copy
  • Outreach

Freedom of Speech: Outreach and Social Media Plan

Audience:

Immediate term: Once we have something complete like a website and the beginnings of a visualization we can reach out to law students at CUNY. Down the line we could get in touch with law students at other institutions, but the CUNY connection means they would be obliged to help us. Later on we can reach out to activists and propose to them sharing the infographic elements of our project. Librarians in DH or Law might be interested in our project as well so that they can share with their Institutions. Submitting an abstract to upcoming conferences in DH would also allow us to receive critical feedback on the project and dive into the technical aspects with professionals in the field.

A few of the key outcomes we hope to accomplish are: create connections with those in the field to to offer insight when reaching an audience outside of the DJ/Law circles. We ultimately want to bring awareness to our topic to those who might not be immediately interested in 1st Amendment discussions but would definitely find it interesting.

We will possibly include an acknowledgements section of the website to give credit to those we spoke to during the creation phase.

 

Social media strategy:

Given that we want our project to be publicly relevant and accessible, and that contemporary discussions of freedom of speech center the Internet and social media, it makes sense for our outreach to lean on social media platforms to build awareness of our site and engage our audience with some of the delight we’ve already had in researching this project.

We’ll use Twitter for its importance in scholarly and political discourse, and for its “public green” vibe. We’ll also use Instagram for its relevance as an activist platform.

Both Twitter and Instagram will push our social media content towards the digestible and visually-oriented, which dovetails with our overall goals of making abstract legal language accessible in a relevant, digestible format.

Our ideal tone is educational, sassy, and irreverent, as we’ll try to present a combination of lurid/ridiculous free speech designations, straightforward educational content about the First Amendment, and user interactive content to test our audience’s knowledge of the true meaning of Freedom of Speech.

Our formats will include memes, “carousel posts” i.e. 10-slide square format decks for sharing educational content on social media, and straightforward informational content, in addition to promoting the launch and existence of the Freedom of Speech* website.

 

Communication and Website:

Since our final product will end up being a website, there isn’t really a need for a second promotional website—before developing and adjusting the vast majority of the content that will go into our project, we will be able to promote the project with a foundation that includes a completed basic landing page, about page, and teaser, including a plugin to allow users to subscribe to updates about the project. Once the site itself is done, we can send out a blast email that lets people know the site is complete.

In order to reach a wider audience, we will write a short recap of our process and publish it to sites like Medium or hackernoon.

We’ll post the finished project link and publicize its CUNY launch in the Data Visualization Society Slack channel, as well as submit it to the NYC Data Jobs & Events newsletter and others TBD. We will also post about our project on groups in the GC Commons.

 

Search Engine Optimization:

As basic SEO goes, when building our site, we will first build a sitemap and submit it to Google,  and we will also include keywords in the header in order to have other search engines more easily identify what our website does. In addition to that, we will be following the Google SEO Starter Guide.

 

Personal Bio/Contributor Statement – Joanne

Joanne Ramadani is a Brooklyn-based information designer, data analyst, and web developer. She is currently a candidate for a Master’s degree in Data Analytics & Visualization at the CUNY Graduate Center. Having graduated from Macaulay Honors College at Baruch College in 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in English and Political Science, which trained her attention to detail and developed her logic skills, she now uses those skills to build websites, scrutinize data, and create fun visualizations that seek to figure out the best way to deliver information to as many people as possible.

As a member of the research, design, and development teams on Freedom of Speech*, Joanne’s responsibilities include cleaning and processing legal data, providing assistance and ideating visualizations on the design end, and co-building the code structure of the website, including the technical aspect of visualizing content. She is also partially responsible for outreach in tandem with the rest of the core team.

Personal Journal Entry – Joanne | 2/23

This week, I feel like my group covered a lot of ground with regard to figuring out what the project will end up looking like, as well as cleaning and processing our data. I realized after our group met up for the first time that, having pinpointed what the raw data looked like in the draft proposal stage, I needed to be able to explain it, so a lot of this week for me was dedicated to research and fleshing out a data/codebook foundation that the group could lean on if necessary while still trying to leave room for pruning concepts.

Being in the conceptual stages feels really strange and nebulous, and I think when Eva and I started crafting our proposal and concept a couple of weeks ago, I felt a little like I was out at sea, flailing among the possibilities. Everything was entirely theoretical, and the project itself was this almost-amorphous thing that was both exciting and full of so much potential that I felt a little lost, so I’m super relieved to find that hammering out the revised project proposal with the group has really helped me visualize this project as a whole and complete end product.

Because I’ve never really done group work with data before, I wasn’t sure how group data cleaning would go, but we got together to kind of comb through it and it wasn’t bad at all. We made considerable progress, and even though I wasn’t able to get a JupyterHub running, screen sharing over Discord has been working just fine. We’re hoping to get our data in a workable state as early as possible so that if we run into any issues, we can get them sorted out really quickly and leave enough room for the vision to come to life. I think we’re proceeding at an incredibly workable pace, and even though I get easily anxious about deadlines, I have faith and confidence in our group and I know we’ll get through any obstacles.

Side note, it’s so funny—in my blog post for NYCDH week, I mentioned something about not envisioning our group needing to check the Fair Use Checklist from Columbia. It turns out we might actually have to use it after all, because we’re going to be relying on a fair amount of literature to explicate some of our landmark cases! I guess I must have accidentally manifested it, but I’m excited about potentially putting that new knowledge into practice.

I’m super looking forward to putting together our work plan and really getting into the meat of the project in the coming weeks. Hopefully everything continues to go as smoothly as it’s been going!

“Transformed” by NYCDH Week

For NYCDH week, I attended the Fair Use workshop (Transformed, I’m Sure) presented by Jill Cirasella, who gave a really compelling and informative presentation on the history of copyright, fair use, and where the reasonable boundaries of a DH project might be with regard to fair use. I thought this workshop was super interesting, especially because it falls into the one of the many Venn diagrams of my interests: law, academics, and transformative works.

Jill truly went above and beyond in keeping the audience engaged, and I especially loved that she used the Grinch’s too-small heart growing in size as a comparison to case precedent allowing the expansion of the fair use clause. The presentation itself was incredibly comprehensive, covering the “letter of the law” in addition to the spirit of it. I also thought it was great that the presentation was centrally focused on the idea of transformative works, because in a lot of ways, that’s what we do when we work with data—we transform it into a narrative, asking questions about it and working with it to obtain answers.

Coming into the presentation, I actually already knew a lot of the case precedent that Jill cited, but I still learned something new—I didn’t know that the World Intellectual Property Organization recognizes indigenous law supremacy, which was absolutely fantastic to hear. Many countries, including the US, are notoriously bad at respecting indigenous people’s rights, so to have a major international governing body actually acknowledge that supremacy feels like a big deal.

One thing I wish we could have seen from the presentation is the role of Disney’s lobbying power in expanding the length of the public domain—I know it’s not necessarily within the scope of how we can work with fair use in the digital humanities, but as an aside in the presentation, it would have been great to show how arbitrary public domain lengths are.

If my group was working with Spotify data (for example), I’d probably be a little more concerned about fair use and copyright law in our project and go through the really helpful fair use checklist Jill provided, but because SCOTUS data is (by nature of the necessity for transparency in US government) public, we likely won’t need to do this. However, if against all odds we find that our work goes so smoothly that we might expand our scope to include papers by constitutional law scholars, then we might have to go through the checklist. Whatever the case, I’m really glad I attended this workshop—knowing the full extent of your rights with regard to copyright law is a great asset to have while working with all sorts of data!

Skillset – Joanne Ramadani

I’ve done a lot of moving around in terms of fields of study–I was in a law program in high school, took an English/Political Science double major in undergrad at Baruch College (minors in NYC Studies and Business Law), then did some tutoring with 826NYC while looking for work in publishing, somehow ended up at a tax firm, where I wrangled billing data and finally sought out the Data Analysis & Visualization (DAV) program here at the GC. As a result of my educational and professional background, I’m skilled in research, writing, and problem solving, but I have an entirely different side that’s more self-taught with regard to being creative. I’ve been a hobby artist for over a decade now, mostly doing digital art, but on occasion I go analog!

Project Management – I’m very organized and on top of deadlines, so I can definitely do this in a pinch, but if given the choice, I don’t prefer to be the one in charge of organizing things.

Outreach – This is definitely not one of my strengths; again, I can do it in a pinch, but I don’t enjoy it and I’ve done enough of it to know that I’m not particularly effective at it either.

Research – This is one of my fortes! I’m really well versed in finding the info and resources a project needs in order to do well using a multitude of search engines, and having been basically “Pre-Law,” my mindset is definitely geared towards cross-referencing and citing information.

Development – This is also one of my core strengths, due to my experience in the Data Analysis & Visualization program. I’ve been developing with a combination of Python and JS for about two years now, and my experience with JavaScript goes back a while as well. Thanks to my background in web development, I can also use HTML/CSS, and I’m also familiar with Bootstrap. Currently, I’m also trying to learn Vue.js, Greensock.js, and lodash.js to complement what I already know of d3.js and Parcel.js.

Design – I’d say this goes hand in hand with my development skills, but I have significantly more experience here (both in terms of self-taught hobby art over a number of years, plus my web development background and time in the DAV program), so this might actually be my strongest skill. My core toolset in design is Procreate (the iPad app) for sketching/iterating, Adobe XD for wireframing, mockups, and prototyping, and Affinity Designer for any graphic design assets that might be needed. I’ve also used Photoshop, but don’t currently have access to it.

Freedom of Speech* || Draft Project Proposal

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Overview

Freedom of Speech* is a web project that helps users to understand the First Amendment right to freedom of speech through interactive visualizations of Supreme Court verdicts that have expanded or contracted the definition of “free speech” over the history of the United States. Users can change parameters including the act of speech, date, court make-up, race of the defendant, and/or status of peace/war to see how the protection of free speech may change. For example, a user can set the filters to see if speech that is considered violent would be protected in 1969, and compare that same speech to its protection status in 2010. Users can also explore a timeline of landmark free speech decisions to view U.S. history and historical events through the changing lens of free speech protection.

Main Questions & Context

    • “What is the US’s stance on limiting freedom of speech/expression?”
    • “What does ‘freedom of speech’ really mean?”
    • “How has the right to ‘freedom of speech’ changed over time?”

This project aims to dispel misconceptions about the First Amendment (specifically its blanket protection of freedom of speech) as static and limitless, and to illustrate how historical circumstances, diplomatic relationships, or the realities of race, class, religion, and other aspects affect whether and how free speech has been protected by the U.S. government.

Intended Audience

Our intended audience is a layperson—one with an interest in the First Amendment that might have been sparked by, say, our last president being banned from Twitter. Is that legal?? (Yes.)

We have both seen many, many instances of people misunderstanding “First Amendment Rights” (in fact, arguing exactly the opposite) in the last few weeks/months/years. We’d like for this project to be an accessible way for the average person, i.e. one who doesn’t speak legalese, to understand 1. who/what is and isn’t covered by First Amendment FOS protections and 2. that freedom of speech protection is not static and clear cut, but an evolving category with sometimes-surprising verdicts.

Contribution to Digital Humanities & Potential Impact

With the massive rise of apps like Parler, discussions of safe spaces and snowflakes and censorship (oh my), and the continuing challenges of “cancel culture,” free speech is a hot topic these days. As the U.S. comes to terms with what free speech means in the internet age, a baseline literacy and understanding of the concept as it is written in the Bill of Rights becomes more and more important.

This Digital Humanities project contributes to the field through its goal of improving critical thinking skills, and fostering a better-informed civic populace, around a topic that is today largely synonymous with social media. We understand that humanistic concerns like good design and aesthetic choices make all the difference to whether someone engages with the topic or not—particularly when it’s one that we hope they will encounter on Twitter or Instagram—and hope to make a robust, data-driven app that is also a pleasure to use and look at.

Final Product

Our goal, from a UX/UI perspective, is an accessible, friendly, non-patronizing website that encourages critical thought while remaining mindful of cognitive overload. We will focus our design on simplicity, performance, and user-friendly architecture, particularly targeting mobile-first design, given that we expect the majority of users to access our site via social media.

We will leverage data visualization with user-adjustable parameters to make a large, unwieldy topic more accessible and relevant to a single user. This is a tried and true strategy utilized by publications like The Upshot and The Pudding, and helps both to hook users in and to help them empathize with questions much larger than one person.

Feasibility Assessment

This project can be completed within a semester. It will require a project manager and an outreach director. Any more help in research, development, and design would be welcome, though these are the areas we have best covered already.

This is an ambitious technical undertaking, but Joanne and Eva are well-positioned to adjust to that. If another developer joins our team, we can do more research and design, and if more researchers or designers join, we can do more development and less research/design. The technical toolset envisioned for this project is a combination of R/Python for data wrangling, Parcel.js or Vue.js or React.js for backend development, and HTML/CSS, d3.js, P5, and vanilla Javascript for frontend development. That being said, we are open to other tools and expertise.

The major tasks will be wrangling and cleaning data, codifying certain necessary variables, and performing text analysis to turn court verdicts and dissents into searchable categories. Currently, the data looks something like this. To complete this project, we will need to do research on the legal history of speech as an issue before the Supreme Court, including the divisions between commercial/political speech and what cases were subject to which landmark case tests.

Skillset Needs

Project Manager: Needed

Outreach: Needed

Research: Lots already done, lots needed for data cleaning/analysis/quality

Development: We are strong here but more help always welcome

Design: We are capable enough here but certainly welcome more experience

 

This proposal was assembled by Joanne Ramadani and Eva Sibinga.