When I started the DAV program in the Fall of 2019, I was faced with the ostensibly unfortunate reality during registration that there was not a single open course in my program. I ended up signing up for two DH courses and one GIS class at Hunter College. In the end, it was a semester marked by transformative thinking: about data (what is it? where does it come from? who makes it? should it actually be called capta?); about categorizations (is it possible to reconcile the inherent messiness of our world with the binaries required to communicate through digital means? who is left in and left out when we decide which structures compartmentalize the world? or, even more important, do we recognize categorization as a subjective, historically situated decision, not a reflection of “inherent truth”?); about visualizations (is there an inherent lie in representing 3D space on a 2D map? what about an inherent lie in representing data sets visually? or an inherent truth in legibility and access?). So many questions!

Since that semester, I’ve taken 6 classes in the DAV program. I’ve continued to think about, and be pushed on, these and other crucial questions about humanist data inquiry. But they’ve more often been from the DAV perspective — that is, the goal was generally to produce data analysis and data visualizations as the deliverables. The questions are important and absolutely considered in the process, but they are on some level incidental to classes that expect a final product of shareable insight via data, rather than, for example, a paper or a round table discussion as the fruits of knowledge production.

The return to the DH side this semester has made me realize how much more action-oriented I’ve become in the last year. I’m constantly thinking about how my work relates to the news, to my life, to the U.S. at large, to the jobs I’d like to have in one year, or five, or ten. Right now I’m both enjoying the opportunity to think deeply about data management plans and group dynamics, and rearing to get started on making stuff. In the last week or two, the rearing to go side has been shouting louder and louder.

I’m happy to have both sides. My background is largely in well-funded academic spaces, where talking about data and equity can happen without the urgency of needing to actually get a project done on a deadline. At worst, this has at times led me to feel like the work I do in private, academic spaces feels irrelevant to the work that’s needed in public spaces. The DAV program is, for me, a great antidote to that. I guess this is all to say, I’m not “move fast and break things,” I’m “think deeply and make stuff.” And I’m ready to make stuff!

In order to maintain complete alignment with the goals of a project, the administrative task of documenting where data comes from, how it is stored, and then made available for future use must be set down. This allows for universal assent regarding the methods for those involved, and allows third-parties to come and quickly gauge the results of a project based upon how accurately the data was wrangled and utilized.

For our project, because we are relying heavily on github there aren’t many hurdles to jump over. The question came up, however, of how we will be using the Case Book summaries from the publisher: InfoBase. There is pretty clear language on their website which doesn’t really point to being flexible.  “ “All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.” 

It’s my belief that this kind of conservative sentiment is meant to deter any who seek commercial gain. Academic publishers are notoriously protective of their IP. I’m assuming that once I reach out to them about our use case that we will encounter no barriers in our academic purposes. We will be discussing this with Micki, however, who I believe has experience with historic documents and the kind of language best used for coming to an agreement with them. 

In the worst case scenario we will have to take the Cases and create our own descriptive language about them. This is not an impossibly difficult task to accomplish, but it would require a lot of extra time on our part. Our project is meant to be a straightforward scrapping of text with much of the work revolving around how to present on the webpage, if one or two of us needed to summarize the Cases in our own language it would put a hold on when we could start working on the webpage. Our case data is in the public domain, but the analysis from the Landmark cases textbook belongs to the publisher. It raises the question that perhaps we could retrieve summaries from another source? In this case we would need to reevaluate our metadata classification we have in place. Again, not an impossible task but we would need to restructure our data accordingly. 

Martin Glick is a Graduate Student at the CUNY Graduate Center pursuing an M.A. in Digital
Humanities. He has a B.A. in Philosophy from City College (CUNY), an M.A. in Philosophy at
Birkbeck College (University of London), and conducted independent research at the Chair for
Legal and Social Philosophy at the University of Göttingen from 2013-2017. He is currently a
Metadata Associate at Callisto Media, which is a data-driven publishing startup. Previously he
worked at John Wiley & Sons in the Editorial department. From Northeastern Pennsylvania, he
now lives in Brooklyn.

His favorite movie is Alien, and he wrote a chapter about it in a volume for the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series.

I created a dashboard in Trello to act as a storehouse for Class Notes, Deadlines, and Meetings that people can share notes and links. Eventually a Gantt chart will be placed here as well.

To continue my post on “thought-in-progress” through screen sharing. Joanne and Eva were gracious enough to work through some of the data wrangling in Python before our very eyes. It was a unique experience that allowed us to peer into the mind of someone working through a problem. The benefit of working in a group project using skills we have honed over the last few years in school or at work is that we are still working through tools we have learned to use. In that sense there is still a testing out of what works best, and thankfully no one in the group is shy about presenting works in progress. In this sense we all get to learn what a JSON file is, how to successfully link up datasets in Github, and what a successful wireframe for a website looks like. 

We took to heart the presentation given by Dr. Lisa Rhody, when creating the collaborator’s agreement. It seems to me that sometimes the boundaries of responsibility can become a little muddled. Especially in cases where members of the group are enthusiastic about being involved in other parts of the project. It only speaks to the benevolence of the members of my group. We have settled on dividing up the work according to established strengths, but are considering recording parts of the workflow for the edification of the other members. Through these videos we are able to share knowledge, and introduce others to at least the fundamentals of programming or UX/UI design.

The advice to centralize the role of Outreach was well received by our group, and I was appointed as the person to spearhead these developments. There does seem to be some work necessary in one crucial aspect, highlighted by Joanne: Where is the boundary between simplifying and potentially losing nuance regarding the outcome of a case. – Does the process of aggregating this data lose nuance? Since not every case is the same (in many different ways, length, people involved, location) We want to avoid a flattening/distortion. To get to the heart of this we intend to meet with Micki who has also dealt with case law to some degree in hter Kissinger Project; and understand better the real-world ramifications of contending with historic and political documents.

One upside of the pandemic forcing communication between people to be conducted online has been that it fosters an environment of openness that heretofore was thought impossible. Lectures and conferences from Oxbridge schools are now made public to anyone with the Zoom link, research clusters like the Berkman Klein Center are focusing on international cooperation regardless of the time zone, and screen sharing through video conferencing tools allows an over-the-shoulder view of how to use software tools from global developers. This last point was well represented by the team at FairCopy, and inspired in my mind a suitable tool for a project that I had been kicking around in my head.

FairCopy is a transcription tool which pairs up images and text side by side to facilitate the transcription and commenting of scanned images. What I appreciated from the presentation which guided us through downloading a Library of Congress file and ingesting it into the program was the intuitive and the process of starting to get text into the editor was quite seamless.

Below is an image of the UI

I have been playing around with the software and hope to transcribe some Journals of the Cybernetics theorist W. Ross Ashby. His journals have had select summaries and keywords transcribed then linked in the webpage to enable the Search function, but a complete transcription has not been undertaken. 

Below is an image of the Journals online.

I want to take up the idea that screen-sharing has eased us into the ability to witness “thought -in-progress”. It struck me during this presentation during the QA session when the developers fielded questions and worked them out in real-time, that because we are in our respective homes, there is a comfort with working things out in front of others. A comfort that we maybe wouldn’t have if we were in a shared space away from our routine surroundings. The advantage is that the attendees get to bear witness to the kinds of thoughts and step by step working out of problems. We are invited into the mind of someone else. That’s what interests me so much about Journal entries. For me, these are snapshots frozen in time of this “thought-in-progress” that we are luckily privy to, due to our decentralized mode of communication. 

A person comfortable in their own home will allow the full unweaving of a process, when presented with an idea. Historically what has happened in the pages of a Journal, but now a screen-shared view of an expert working with software offers a similar insight.