Returning to the topic of scale in relation to the impact and efficacy of our projects, a couple of questions arise at this juncture:  To what extent should technology automation and systemization play a part in the development of DH projects?  Additionally, to what extent should and can the DH community at large serve as publishing gateways and aggregators in order to scale the impact and the investment of time and effort of DH teams?

Having divided our approximately twenty-five person class into five teams with roughly five persons per team, collaboration at this scale has allowed for a relatively minimal effort needed for systematizing and automating workflows and/or data/media pipelines.  One wonders how  our collaboration and objectives might have changed if instead of five projects, our class had been divided into two projects with roughly twelve to thirteen collaborators on each team.

In relation scaling the dissemination of academic work, traditional academic publishing has often involved large scale publishing networks and pipelines.  The traditional publishing industry served as a dissemination platform at scale for scholarship largely authored by individuals.  In the new model, digital projects are often created and built by a team of collaborators and are deployed and disseminated without an intermediate publishing network.  While individually authored scholarship relies on informally associated collaborators, including among others librarians and colleagues, the technical, multimedia, and analytical computation tools involved in digital projects bring together a number of specialized and dedicated roles in a more formally organized DH team.

Perhaps another path would have been to divide the class into three or four teams consisting of one or two digital projects and one platform infrastructure team that would be dedicated to developing or integrating projects with infrastructures and networks, thereby providing the intermediate agents traditional publishing once provided.  The efforts of the team would necessitate the incorporation of research, technology skills, and knowledge that would serve as  a part of the DH toolkit going forward.  Members of this infrastructure team might divide their time between the digital projects and the infrastructure efforts.  As an additional benefit, more cohesion would develop within the larger group as a whole and potentially more interconnection would emerge with the DH community at various levels.  A effort of this kind raises the question of the extent to which infrastructure is a sine qua non aspect of the DH discipline and not merely an object of study as a DH subfield.

While a monolithic platform for the dissemination of digital scholarship would be neither efficacious nor desirable, technology solutions that facilitate an interconnected ecosystem of digital work would offer a way to leverage labor and thus amplify the impact of DH efforts.  Critical theory and transdisciplinary understanding underlying DH suggests that while technology is by no means the panacea claimed by tech futurists, technology solutions might nevertheless offer opportunities for furthering the humanities in general and digital endeavors in particular. 

Along these lines, one might well imagine building out and interconnecting already existing networks of DH databases that aggregate digital works constructed by DH teams.  Given how the Internet has long since outgrown the file based hypertext architecture designed by Tim Berners-Lee just over thirty years ago, the challenge becomes how to represent and promote temporally-based user experiences involving video, hypermedia, and dynamic interactions.  One possible approach in this effort might be to build off the architecture underlying the Internetworking project SOLID, another endeavor led by Berners-Lee to store “data securely in decentralized data stores called Pods. Pods are like secure personal web servers for data. When data is stored in someone’s Pod, they control which people and applications can access it.”

With only a few weeks left before our final presentation, the task is underway to best capture and more deeply articulate the significance of Corona Chronicles.  One area of indirect significance relating to the impact of the pandemic on younger generations comes through in the research on the long-term effects of in utero influenza exposure during the 1918 influenza pandemic.  In a study published in 2006, Dr. Douglas Almond, an economist at Columbia University, concluded that “cohorts in utero during the pandemic displayed reduced educational attainment, increased rates of physical disability, lower income, lower socioeconomic status, and higher transfer payments compared with other birth cohorts.”  Almond’s study leverages vital statistics available during the 1918 pandemic and census data for 1960, 1970, and 1980.  As the following graphs taken from Almond’s report illustrate, significant variances occurred for individuals born during or shortly after the 1918 pandemic.

1960 average years of schooling: men and women born in the United States. source: Almond, Douglas. 2006. “Is the 1918 Influenza Pandemic Over? Long‐Term Effects of In Utero Influenza Exposure in the Post‐1940 U.S. Population.” Journal of Political Economy.

1970 High School Graduation: by year of birth. source: Almond, Douglas. 2006. “Is the 1918 Influenza Pandemic Over? Long‐Term Effects of In Utero Influenza Exposure in the Post‐1940 U.S. Population.” Journal of Political Economy.

1980 male disability rate: physical disability limits work. source: Almond, Douglas. 2006. “Is the 1918 Influenza Pandemic Over? Long‐Term Effects of In Utero Influenza Exposure in the Post‐1940 U.S. Population.” Journal of Political Economy.

Almond also mentions research suggesting links between the 1918 pandemic and possible increases in the occurrence of schizophrenia, diabetes, and stroke (Almond 2006, 680).

In another more recent study published in 2017, researchers at the North Carolina Research Triangle Park, Brown University, and Duke University concluded that “[i]n utero exposure to the influenza pandemic increased functional limitations and hospitalization rates in old age” (Acquah, Dahal, and Sloan 2017, 1477)

Given these data and conclusions, which persuasively argue for the development of public health policies that support prenatal health centered around the needs and wellbeing of mothers, a host of related questions might be raised concerning the impact of pandemics on children’s health.  What long-term impact did the 1918 pandemic have on parenting and child care?  What were the differential long-term outcomes between families stricken by the 1918 pandemic and families which were less seriously affected?  What long-term impact did the closure of schools during the 1918 pandemic have on students?

An area of more direct significance pertains to the understanding and treatment of childhood trauma.  Within the context of epigenetic, developmental, and traditionally understood childhood trauma, the role of art as a creative expression of subjectivity offers the possibility for therapeutic spaces for healing.  Of the many definitions of trauma, the notion of trauma as any unmanageable, often dysphoric, unresolved autonomic nervous system response (Levine 1997) that is disassociated from its healing environment might consider art therapy as part of a fundamentally somatic resolution.  Beyond the healing that can result from the doing of art lies the healing resulting from having one’s own trauma recognized.  Art as a shared experience therapeutically presents the possibility for a supportive environment that can help re-associate and reintegrate fragmented and unresolved psychological and emotional wounds.  As was recently noted by Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser in an essay applying Lacanian theory to art therapy:

“The distinction Lacan makes in his twenty-fourth seminar (1976–1977) between full speech (speech that is full of meaning) and empty speech (speech voided of sense and reduced to its real value),…as well as the increasing emphasis in Lacan’s late teaching (as of the twentieth seminar of 1972–1973…) on nonsensical speech voided of sense, indicate the necessity to draw a distinction between the clinical role of artistic modalities which engage language’s semantic dimension (story-telling, image dialoguing, psychodrama) and artistic modalities which can work towards the reduction of the phantasm to its material, non-signifying components, traumatic residues of an enjoyment beyond sense” (Sharon-Zisser 2018, 7).

References

Acquah, J. K., Roshani Dahal, and Frank A. Sloan. 2017. “1918 Influenza Pandemic: In Utero Exposure in the United States and Long-Term Impact on Hospitalizations.” American journal of public health 107 no. 9 (September 2017): 1477–1483. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2017.303887

Almond, Douglas. 2006. “Is the 1918 Influenza Pandemic Over? Long‐Term Effects of In Utero Influenza Exposure in the Post‐1940 U.S. Population.” Journal of Political Economy 114 no. 4 (August 2006): 672-712. dio:10.1086/507154

Levine, Peter A. 1997. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Sharon-Zisser, Shirley. 2018. “Art as Subjective Solution: A Lacanian Theory of Art Therapy.” International Journal of Art Therapy: Inscape 23 (1): 2–13. doi:10.1080/17454832.2017.1324884.

With the widespread adoption of 24-bit true color graphics during the 1990s, graphic designers were handed thousands if not millions of colors to work with in the visual design of websites. Since then, the color palette of a website has become one of the most important visual communication elements, allowing for the construction, together with fonts and cascading stylesheet layouts, of a virtually limitless number of identities and online personalities. After having initially modeled Corona Chronicles on a website composed of bright red and dark grey for the main colors, members of team, including the team’s secondary school advisors and contributors, began to note how other colors might better reflect identities which secondary school students would identify with, including the suggestion that a gender neutral palette would be more representative. This led to a search for a new color palette. Through an open and democratically deliberative process, team members generated eight palette proposals using an online color generator and submitted them for deliberation. The deliberation on the eight color palettes provided the opportunity for the team to reach a consensus through a vote tally by three secondary school students and five post-secondary students, which was undertaken in the Zoom chat panel. This process stands out as perhaps one of the highlights of the project in that the end result was not just a better website, but also an example of a consensus based decision making process.

Perhaps the aspect of the consensus based decision making process that was most validating was the way in which the deliberation was driven by the observations of the secondary school students. The secondary school students became the leaders of the decision making process.   Their observations shaped the conversation and drove the deliberation.  Whereas perhaps other efforts dedicated to the well being of younger generations, including to some extent such efforts as UNICEF, employ top-down hierarchical and paternalistic internal processes, the internalization of the goal of empowerment into the decision making process offered a  potential for a more genuine transformation through emancipatory collaboration.

As Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “[a] real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust” (60). To what extent might this kind of rebalancing of power asymmetries, in its engagement with agency and history, constitute an authentically dialogical transformation of Freirian conscientização (emancipatory consciousness)?  Could the end result of emancipatory collaboration be the moment in which the roles we take on to actualize ourselves and our social collectives melt away, leaving us not knowing who is the student, who is the teacher, who is the leader, who is the follower, who are the organizers, or who are the organized?

The logical conclusions of dialogical institutional relations evoke the imaginaries of new institutional structures, including educational institutions designed by students and teachers and polities designed by the entire demos and not just those who confer upon themselves political and economic status. Looking back one wonders how the radical aspects of social movements of empowerment, such as the literacy campaigns in Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua, and China might have helped to usher in global anti-authoritarian consciousness evident not just in various regions of the global south but in countless communities throughout the global north.

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

As Amanda points out, our recent outreach efforts have surfaced new learnings related to the well being and concerns of our contributors. The process of soliciting contributions has raised questions of reciprocity and the importance of understanding not just the general contexts but more significantly the immediate perceptions of our participants. Similarly, shifts from initial commitments to reticence to contribute highlight the risks of sharing personal experiences with the public at large. These learnings once again foreground the importance of engaging with a praxis of ethical care.

As one approach to an ethic of care, Rita Manning describes an ethic of care as “a way of understanding one’s moral role, of looking at moral issues and coming to an accommodation in moral situations”. She further defines care as involving “a basic human capacity to recognize and respond to the needs of others and to moderate our behavior in light of the good or harm it might cause to others.” Manning highlights four aspects of care: (1) moral attention, (2) sympathetic understanding, (3) relationship awareness, and (4) accommodation and harmony  (Manning 2009, 105-107).

In constructing a website and archive dedicated to the amplification of under-represented voices, it is easy to overlook the time and effort taken by contributors to create contributions. This raises the question of volunteerism within an environment of pressures and stresses, resulting in large part from the consequences of regimes of neoliberal austerity. It could be argued that our time under these regimes of exploitation and oppression becomes the ultimate site of extraction. As perhaps the most existentially finite resource without which life is impossible, time for living and being could arguably be counted as one of the most precious characteristics of life within the biosphere. Given the extent of already extracted time, setting aside additional time often involves difficult evaluations. Moral incentives and volunteerism need to be understood in the context of these and other pressures and stresses.

In terms of vulnerabilities resulting from publicly sharing personal experiences, the environment of public spaces under current adversarial and competitive conditions is fraught with potential abuses that often result in negative consequences. As digital media increasingly reduces the possibilities of anonymity, sharing personal experiences leads to justifiable ambivalence. This ambivalence prompts an imaginary of a world of public spaces designed to protect the privacy of individuals and their public personas. Until these protections are in place, it would seem to be a practical matter to carve out smaller protectable spaces within the world wide (and wild) web. As content creators consider these issues, the dilemma remains between the potential benefit through public visibility and the costs of such visibility.

Reference

Manning, Rita. 2009. “A Care Approach” in A Companion to Bioethics, 2nd Ed. edited by Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer 105-116. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

It’s one thing to lose a computer file or for that matter any hard-copy documents related to one’s personal affairs.  It’s another thing to lose files and data which other people depend on.  I’m reminded of the fires that destroyed the warehouses of Universal Studios in the San Fernando Valley in 2008. According to news reports, original master recordings of over 800 recording artists were destroyed in whole or part, almost a complete who’s who of American popular music.  The fire reportedly destroyed recording data of rock-and-rollers like Buddy Holly, country icons like Dolly Parton, jazz virtuosos like Aretha Franklin, blues giants like Muddy Waters, among many others.  Clearly the first and foremost principles of data management deserve to be data preservation and data integrity.

Unfortunately the mindset needed for assuring the satisfactory exercise of these principles has often been adopted momentarily at best.  The destruction of many libraries throughout the ages suggest we have been doomed to repeating the same mistake, again and again.  Perhaps one of the many curses of the human condition is the tendency to substitute aspiration for principle.

source: Global Datavault, https://www.globaldatavault.com/blog/information-destruction-history/, accessed 03/09/2021

click image to enlarge

In terms of research itself, research practices tend to be most effective when information is available and easy to retrieve.  While the Internet has generally opened up previously closed avenues to knowledge and information, one of the drawbacks of using the Internet as a tool for research is the over abundance of data storage locations.  When research data is stored in more than a couple of locations, data becomes difficult to keep track of and use effectively.  Critical evidence can be lost not because the data has been erased but because its location is no longer known or insufficient cataloging occurred.  Using only one tool for research such as Zotero, in which data is stored and centralized in on place and cataloging can be semi-automated, mitigates the risk of loosing track of references, internet resources, and other research upon which one’s current research depends.

A second problem involves the double-edged nature of digital media.  As easy as it is to duplicate digital data, it can be just as easy to delete.  Depending on the time table of the research, internet pages can suddenly disappear without a trace, leaving the visitor watching in dismay a 404-page-not-found animation.  Depending on the value of the missing information, a search in the Wayback Machine may or may not yield the version of the page initially accessed.  To some extent the ephemerality of the web poses a serious risk to the quality of research.  As a result, an additional evaluation of internet data comes into play in terms of determining the need for redundant data preservation by downloading the web page.

While automated redundancy more broadly has gotten better since the early days of the Internet, we are still not at that point when all applications automagically save all significant versions into a 100% redundant versioning system.  Total and automated redundancy goes against the right to be forgotten, the right to be anonymous, and the right not to be tied to a moment in the past.  Control over the degree and nature of redundancy to some extent offers freedoms at the cost of the discipline and responsibility to judiciously save a version.

As research goes beyond the work of a single individual to encompass group collaboration, effective data management takes on an even greater importance.  Without clear roles for  managing data, the likelihood of encountering problems will persist.  Rock-solid technologies may be in place, but if the responsibilities for the management of data are not clearly defined and assigned, state-of-the-art storage technologies will not by themselves prevent data loss or the reduction of data integrity.