The Cleaners (2018)

Please join us in MITH on October 30, 2019 (All Hallows’ Eve Eve) from 6-8pm for a screening of The Cleaners, a documentary which provides an in depth look at the hidden labor of content moderation that makes today’s social media platforms possible. Once the dream of Silicon Valley tech startups, the democratization of web publishing has brought huge challenges to the mega-corporations that run today’s social media platforms, as they struggle to prevent the viral spread of online hate, violence and abuse.

Key to these moderation systems are large numbers of human moderators, who interpret community guidelines, and sometimes clandestine content rules, in order to decide what content will remain online. As Sarah Roberts details in her book Behind the Screen (a recent Digital Studies Colloquium pick) commercial content moderators work behind the scenes, in remote locations and precarious working conditions, where they are often subjected to a barrage of unsettling material that can leave lasting psychological and social impacts.

A brief discussion will follow the screening. Popcorn and soda pop will be available, but feel free to bring some take-out or some pre-Halloween candy.

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Measuring Impact of Digital Repositories

Simon Tanner will offer a sneak peek at the Balanced Value Impact Model 2.0 (BVI Model). Tanner will introduce the Digital Humanities at King’s College London, and link this to his open and collaborative research practices to tell the story of the intellectual development of the BVI Model. He will detail the BVI Model 2.0 to highlight what’s new and how it works. Tanner will relate these changes to his collaboration with Europeana to develop their Impact Playbook and look to the future of that tool.

The session will include time for questions and discussion.

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Simon Tanner is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He is a Digital Humanities scholar with a wide-ranging interest in cross-disciplinary thinking and collaborative approaches that reflect a fascination with interactions between memory organization collections (libraries, museum, archives, media and publishing) and the digital domain.

As an information professional, consultant, digitization expert and academic he works with major cultural institutions across the world to assist them in transforming their impact, collections and online presence. He has consulted for or managed over 500 digital projects, including digitization of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and has built strategy with a wide range of organizations. These include the US National Gallery of Art and many other museums and national libraries in Europe, Africa, America and the Middle East. Tanner has had work commissioned by UNESCO, the Danish government, the Arcadia Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  He founded the Digital Futures Academy that has run in the UK, Australia, South Africa and Ghana with participants from over 40 countries.

Research into image use and sales in American art museums by Simon Tanner has had a significant effect on opening up collections access and OpenGLAM in the museum sector. Tanner is a strong advocate for Open Access, open research and the digital humanities. Tanner was chair of the Web Archiving sub-committee as an independent member of the UK Government-appointed Legal Deposit Advisory Panel. He is a member of the Europeana Impact Taskforce which developed the Impact Playbook based upon his Balanced Value Impact Model. He is part of the AHRC funded Academic Book of the Future research team.

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Prior to joining MITH, T’Sey-Haye was key in making sure that the “Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black” conference hosted by the AADHum initiative in October of this year came off so successfully. At that time, she was a member of the Marketing and Communications Office in the College of Arts and Humanities.

Check out her biography, follow her on Twitter, and look for her byline here talking about the exciting things happening on the Documenting the Now project.

Welcome T’Sey-Haye!

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With a $1.2 Million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, Shift, and the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA) will collaborate to lead the ongoing work of the Documenting the Now project. Started in 2014 with a grant to Washington University in St. Louis in partnership with the University of California, Riverside and MITH, Documenting the Now is committed to developing tools and community practices that support the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media and web archives. Continuing the important work the project has accomplished over the past four years, the second phase of Documenting the Now will be focused on three interdependent strands of activity: software development, pedagogy, and engagement with community-based archiving of social justice activism.

Leading this second phase of Documenting the Now will be Trevor Muñoz, Interim Director of MITH & Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research at UMD who will serve as the Principal Investigator and the Administrative Lead; Bergis Jules, Director of Equity Initiatives at Shift Design Inc who will serve as a Co-Principal Investigator and the Project Director; Dr. Meredith Clark, Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at UVA who will serve as a Co-Principal Investigator and Academic Lead; and Ed Summers, Lead Software Developer at MITH who will be the project’s Technical Lead.

During this phase of the project, our technical work, led by Summers with support from Alexandra Dolan-Mescal,  Francis Kayiwa and Dr. Raffaele Viglianti, will focus on continuing to develop, test, and deploy the software utilities built during phase one. These tools include DocNow, the Tweet ID Dataset Catalog, Hydrator and Twarc. One of the main focuses for the software that the project team will develop in this phase will be human-centered design approaches that privilege interaction between content creators and users of our tools who are interested in collecting social media data as archival content.

One example of work that will exemplify the project’s goal to undertake human centered design is Social Humans. Created by Dolan-Mescal, UX and Web Designer for Documenting the Now, Social Humans is a set of data labels designed to empower content creators and inform researchers about user intent. In addition to continuing work developing software and fostering a community of practice around social media/web archiving that is grounded in an ethics of care for the histories of oppressed people, the next phase will also see the project team engage in pedagogical activities around social media and race, with the exciting addition of Dr. Meredith Clark as a Co-Principal Investigator. Dr. Clark is a former newspaper journalist whose research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power. Her work on the project will include the development of academic courses, including a series of experiential learning tasks and assignments using DocNow tools and support. The project team is excited she agreed to join this phase of the effort.

Phase two will also include work on archiving activism history through a set of community-based archiving workshops. The goal of the program will be to build digital community-based archives in direct partnership with social justice activist organizations. Local activists are usually the people closest to the issues negatively impacting a community and they are most frequently on the front lines agitating for support and offering the most effective solutions, whether their causes are addressing police violence, inadequate educational opportunities, food scarcity, mass incarceration, or racial injustice. The Documenting the Now project is interested in exploring how we might build digital community-based archives from the perspectives of local activists and in equitable partnership with them. The archives will be built on Mukurtu CMS and we’re excited to work with that team because of their commitment to community control of local cultural heritage. Activist groups will be selected to participate in the program through an open application process. We will be sharing more information about the workshops and the application process soon, including incentives for the activist organizations, the workshop team, and the structure of the program. Stay tuned to the Documenting the Now Twitter and blog, or join our Slack for more information.

MITH, along with our partners, are extremely grateful for the support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for Documenting the Now, and for the Foundation’s continued support of cultural heritage work that is intentionally community centered and grounded in an ethic of care for the lived experiences of the most vulnerable people in our society. We are particularly excited for the opportunity that continued support provides for enacting our strategic values in combination with the Foundation’s support for African American History, Culture and the Digital Humanities (AADHum).

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is a leading digital humanities center that pursues disciplinary innovation and institutional transformation through applied research, public programming, and educational opportunities. Jointly supported by the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and the University of Maryland Libraries, MITH engages in collaborative, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of technology and humanistic inquiry.

Shift Design, Inc is a US 501(c)3 non-profit corporation that was established with a specific focus to design products for social change. Much of our work to date has focused on building an inclusive record of our shared cultural heritage, including projects like Historypin and Storybox.

The Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia began in Fall 2000 as an interdisciplinary undergraduate major in the College of Arts and Sciences. The department is historical and critical in orientation and takes media as its object of study. The department focuses on the forms, institutions, and effects of media (radio, film, television, photography, print, digital and electronic media), with particular emphasis on the mass media of the modern and contemporary period.

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In February of 2018, MITH spent dedicated time talking about sustainability of digital projects with a team from the University of Pittsburgh’s Visual Media Workshop (VMW) as part of a focused user testing session for The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap. The research project that produced the Roadmap was led by Alison Langmead, with Project Managers Aisling Quigley (2016-17) and Chelsea Gunn (2017-18). The final goal of that project was to create a digital sustainability roadmap for developers and curators of digital projects to follow. The work was initially based on what the project team discovered during its NEH-funded project, “Sustaining MedArt.” In this blog post, which is a late entry in MITH’s Digital Stewardship Series from 2016, I’m going to talk a bit about what I discovered during the process of using the roadmap for one of MITH’s projects, how I synthesized our discoveries in the form of a concrete tool for MITH to utilize the roadmap afterward, and how this has changed some of my conceptions about digital sustainability practices.

The process of walking a future digital project through the roadmap can be completed either in a full eight-hour day session, or two four-hour sessions. During  the process, you work through three sections, each with different modules pertaining to aspects of a project’s future sustainability prospects. We chose the latter, with each attending member focusing on a different MITH project they were developing or working on. I opted to use a project for which we were awaiting funding at the time, Unlocking the Airwaves: Revitalizing an Early Public and Educational Radio Collection. Although significant time and effort went into developing the grant proposal for Airwaves, which included a section on sustainability, the Roadmap process cemented how much more concretely we could have been thinking through these issues, and how better planning for those components from the start would lead to better management of the project. In fact, one finding that Langmead and her team had discovered as they developed and tested the roadmap, is that thinking through the project management aspects of a digital project was a necessary first component to even being able to effectively get through the remaining sections of roadmap exercises. So as they went along, they added several elements and exercises to Sections A and B which force users to pinpoint the structural elements of their project. These include elements such as access points, deliverables, workflows, intellectual goals, data flow, and anticipated digital lifespan. This kind of work is essentially an extension of a project charter, which often includes a lot of these same basic concepts. In fact, Module B1 of the roadmap encourages users to create or reference existing charters, and stresses that using the roadmap in conjunction with a charter enhances the usefulness of both tools.

The lifespan questions in Section A were eye-opening, because although the need to ask them seems obvious – How long do you want your project to last? Why have you chosen this lifespan? – I think we as stewards of digital information feel compelled to predict unrealistically long lifespans, which Langmead and her collaborators define as “BookTime:”

“BookTime” is a term we have coined to denote a project lifespan equivalent to, “As long as a paper-based codex would last in the controlled, professional conditions of a library.” It may often be assumed that this is coterminous with “Forever,” but that belief relies heavily on a number of latent expectations about the nature of libraries, the inherent affordances of paper and glue, and other infrastructural dependencies.

The module asks us to acknowledge that not every digital project can realistically span decades into the future, and that sometimes this honesty is better for both the project and your team. The module also leverages concepts such as ‘graceful degradation,’ and ‘Bloom-and-Fade,’ both of which, in moments of dark humor, felt similar to planning for a project’s  hospice care or estate. “It’s okay, everything dies, let’s just be open in talking about it and how we’ll get through it together.” Humor aside, it was a useful exercise for me to acknowledge that time, change, and entropy will stand in the way of a project achieving BookTime, and that that IS, in fact, okay.

The other two sections and exercises that I felt were the most useful and that provided the core, structural materials on which to base a sustainability plan were Sustainability Priorities (Section A4) and Technological Infrastructure (Sections B2 and B3). In the former, we were asked to list out the core structural components of a project “without which your project simply would not be your project,” and to list them in order of priority. This could include things such as, but not limited to, authority records, curated access points, facets, geo-spatial data, or digitized materials. We were also asked to define the communities that each property served. In the latter, we were asked to list out every single technological component of the project, from Google Drive, to Trello, to IIIF servers, to the university’s digital repository, define the function(s) of each, and assign project team members that are responsible for each. Then we were asked to realistically assess how long each technology was guaranteed to be funded, as well as “how the duration of the funding for members of your project team compares with the duration of the funding for technologies they maintain, keeping in mind that funding discrepancies may require special considerations and/or contingency plans to ensure uninterrupted attention.” Again, at first glance, much of this may seem very logical and obvious, but actually doing these exercises is illuminating (and sometimes sobering).

After Sections A and B force you to have a reckoning with the deep dark potential (good and bad) of your project, Section C focuses on applying the the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA)’s Levels of Preservation to your identified structural components. The Levels of Preservation are a set of recommendations that align the entire the digital preservation spectrum in six core areas: Access, Backing up Work, Permissions, Metadata, File Formats, and Data Integrity. For each of these areas, the roadmap defines four ‘levels’ of commitment to each of these areas, and what each of those levels really mean. For example, Level 1 for Data Integrity involves designating which project members have credentials for certain accounts and services, and who has read/write/move/delete authorization. Levels 2-3 requires the ability to repair data and create fixity information for stable files, and Level 4 specifies the checking of that fixity data specifically in response to specific events or activities. After defining your current and anticipated levels in each area, you’re asked to define concrete actions your team would need to undertake in order to achieve your desired level. Once again, these exercises encourage expectation management, with comments like “Please note! Reaching Level 4 sustainability practices is not the goal. Your work here is to balance what your project needs with the resources (both in terms of technology and staff) that you have.” It also notes that it is “absolutely okay” to decide that your project will choose Level 0 for any one of these areas, choosing consciously not to engage with that area, using the resources you have to focus on what your team wants to prioritize.

Module A3 in written form

After the two four-hour meetings, my brain was full and I was full of new ideas about my project that probably should have already occurred to me, but that only coalesced in any meaningful way by walking through the roadmap process. I’ve also been around long enough to know that the giddy enthusiasm that comes after a meeting like this can die on the vine if those ideas aren’t transformed into actionable items and documented somewhere. I did have the printed roadmap modules and exercises with my written answers on them, and Langmead and her team were clear that if we wanted to merely file (or scan) those written documents and stop there, that was fine. But written in the final module of the roadmap is the recommendation that after its completion, “make sure that you store the documentation for this, and all other, STSR modules in one of your reliable sites of project documentation.” So after several months of contemplation, I finally determined that MITH’s most reliable current site of project documentation is Airtable, which we’ve been using more and more to track aspects of different projects.

Airtable is an online relational database application that looks and functions like a spreadsheet in its default ‘Grid’ UI, but which also has more robust relational functions allowing you to meaningfully connect data between different tables/worksheets. As opposed to merely entering my answers to each module/exercise, I opted to begin by actually moving references and links to all the roadmap’s sections and modules into two tables in Airtable, so that the full text of each module was easily at hand for reference. I also included base, table, and

column descriptions at all levels (this would be the rough equivalent of Excel comments), which explain how information should be entered or that gave sample entries. The base description also provides an overview to this whole exercise, and gives attribution to the project in the format requested by Langmead and her team.

There are descriptions throughout with details on how to utilize each table or field. Click on the ‘i’ Info button to display them.

There were actual spreadsheets provided by the Roadmap’s project team for certain exercises, and I uploaded those as new tables in Airtable, and modified them as needed to connect/link with other tables. For example, the Technological Infrastructure table (which includes all the various technologies used by your project), the ‘Project Member Responsible’ column is linked to the Project Team table. So after you’ve entered the data for each, you can go back to the Project Team table and see all the tech components each member is responsible for, rolled up in a linked record field. There’s also a reference table listing out the definitions of Levels 1-4 for each of the six NDSA areas, so when you’re deciding what to enter in the Sustainability Levels table, you can instantly reference that table and choose an appropriate level for each area. After crafting the ‘template,’ I tested its usability by entering all the data from Unlocking the Airwaves that I’d written down. By doing that I realized where there were a few tweaks and bottlenecks that needed ironing out, and went back and modified the template. See below for a few more screenshots of the completed template.

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So now we’ve got the roadmap data for Unlocking the Airwaves saved in a reliable site of project documentation. MITH team members are now encouraged (but not required) to use the template as we develop new projects, and it’s available to anyone else who’d like to request a blank duplicated copy. Dr. Langmead also provided a gentle but useful reminder that there is inherent risk in picking and using any such technology for this purpose, since platforms like Airtable may not always remain available. She suggested that we include a mention along the lines of “The inclusion of Airtable in your project’s suite of technologies should be considered carefully (in line with the work done in Modules A5 and B2)” in the intro description text for the base, which we did.

In a way this was also a sense-making exercise wherein, by taking all the roadmap data and turning it into structured data, I’d not only be able to sync up all these components in my head and turn them into actionable tasks, I’d also better retain the information. Anyone who has transformed, mapped, or structured previously unstructured data knows that by doing these tasks, you become much more intimately connected to your data. But what I think really appeals to me about the roadmap process is the mindfulness aspect. It encourages participants to think beyond the theoretical concepts of sustainability and actually apply them, write them down, look at them, consider their implications, and be honest about project expectations as aligned with available resources. In a world of overtapped resources and academic and bureaucratic hurdles, that’s an incredibly valuable skill to have.

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Fred Turner’s interview with Logic Magazine¹ was one of the first readings for MITH 610: Critical Topics in Digital Studies, the introductory course to digital humanities at the University of Maryland. Over the course of the semester, we were asked to complete several exercises that incorporated digital methodologies, and I decided to return to Turner’s reading for our mini data story exercise. For this exercise, we were asked to gather a Twitter data set using twarc and to develop a data story with the data we collected.

My central questions were: Is engineering culture “about making the product” as Fred Turner asserts? Is it about more, or less, or something altogether different? These questions motivated me to collect CSV data filled with tweets that included “#engineering.” I am interested in how society constructs the image of engineering and how this image might influence students’ relationships to engineering, including decisions to pursue engineering as a major and interactions with the curriculum once they begin engineering coursework. My working assumption is that we each have an image of “the engineer,” an image that functions much like Alasdair MacIntyre’s “character.” MacIntyre defines character as “a very special type of social role which places a certain kind of moral constraint on the personality of those who inhabit them in a way in which many other social roles do not.”² If #engineering is what an engineer does, then my concern is how the image of that doing constrains.

While hashtags can be used to follow social justice movements, for example to “reveal a feminist activist assemblage,”³ I want to see if “#engineering” might reveal an assemblage from which I can derive adjectives to describe “the engineer.” Because I am interested in a snapshot of how engineering is depicted, I did not modify the twarc search syntax for “#engineering.” If, as one scholar has suggested, “the concept of the hashtag promises constancy and stability of the image,” then the hashtag offers some insight into the image of engineering⁴. I wanted a broad range of data from a diversity of users, so I started the search and let it run for several minutes before pausing it. The paused search returned 15,157 tweets sent between Friday, April 20, 2018 and Tuesday, April 24, 2018.

Questions I am interested in answering about this data include:

• Why do people use the hashtag?
• Who uses the hashtag?
• What are the most popular or influential accounts and tweets using the hashtag?
• Who follows accounts that use the hashtag?
• Who RTs tweets with the hashtag and who follows them?
• How do people respond to tweets with the hashtag?
• What types of media, e.g. images and videos, accompany tweets with the hashtag?

I can posit answers to some of these questions by using spreadsheets and word clouds to analyze the tweets. First, to understand why people might use the hashtag, I generated the word cloud in Fig. 1. It represents other hashtags that accounts used in addition to #engineering within the same tweet. To generate the word cloud, I copied the “hashtags” column from the .csv file into a free online tool, WordClouds.com. The bigger the word appears the more often it occurred.

The words that occurred most often were related to jobs and hiring. Specifically, “CareerArc” is a company that specializes in online recruiting. I was surprised to see jimmyfallon on the word cloud. I discovered that it first appeared in this tweet:

And, then it appears to have been scraped as a hashtag associated with engineering by an account promoting continuing education programs and tweeted over and over again:

To better understand who uses the hashtag, I copied and pasted user descriptions through the same word cloud generator. The results are displayed here:

“Engineering” is the word that occured most often, which suggests that many of the accounts identify with or specialize in engineering somewhat exclusively. The other word that caught my eye was “Need.” Given the high occurrence of career related words, my initial guess was that perhaps users were sharing that they needed a job. However, a small sample of user descriptions with the word “need” suggests that they are framing their expertise as something that is needed. For example:

“For all travelers in India, a Map of India is a must and thus the need for us to find the best map for you.” @MapsofIndia

“Official account of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University – Worldwide. Giving you exactly the education you need, exactly the way you need it.” @ERAUWorldwide

“McFarland Johnson is a recognized leader in infrastructure planning, design & construction management, serving the daily needs of communities throughout the US.” @McFar_Johnson

To better understand the “who,” I also used a pivot table to identify the top 10 accounts using #engineering. The results displayed in the table suggest that the hashtag is often used by accounts whose primary function is recruiting.

Of course, using the hashtag does not mean that the tweet is influential. To start to identify influential tweets I decided to look at favorited tweets because retweets seemed to be more automated, for example, a circle of accounts all retweeting the same content. Below are the top 10 most favorited tweets. Most of the tweets express wonder at the feats of #engineering. @colin_furze, who also has a YouTube account “with all the crazy inventions and projects,” appears 3 times. He has approximately 35,800 followers. Exploring how the invocation of wonder overlaps with the more pragmatic concern of getting a job could be the focus of future analysis.

I tried to find an easy way to visualize the network/assemblage swirling about #engineering. I do not have previous experience with this, but after a few emails and discovering that NodeXL does not work on on Apple computers, I found GEPHI. I downloaded it and realized it would take a little time to learn the software and properly format my data. Reading about the software, I learned about “nodes” (in the case of Twitter, users) and “edges” (connections between users). Since my own personal discovery, I have seen two scholars present on the work they did with GEPHI, and I realize it is commonly used for visualizing social media networks. To create a clearer picture of the influence of the accounts using the hashtag, mastering GEPHI might be the best next step. However, even with GEPHI, this dataset is limited, and therefore, it may or may not represent what the public assumes about engineering and engineers.

In terms of ethical questions, I realize that the twarc search may have captured private accounts, but the information I have included here seems to be from accounts intended to be public. My goal in collecting this data is to address an ethical question, specifically, “who we see as inventors [or to use my word, engineers], what we see as creativity [or to use my word, engineering], and on whose terms their ideas and practices are valued.”⁵ Returning to Turner’s opening quote, this mini data story suggests that engineering culture is first about getting a job, not “about making the product.”⁶ If that is the case, then the use of #engineering is a “digital redline” because it is potentially “creating and normalizing structural and systemic isolation” by constraining who becomes an engineer⁷. This constraint could function both materially (perhaps only certain people can see the job posts) and symbolically (perhaps the image of who is an engineer prohibits some people from pursuing those jobs). Equally important is how the explicit connection between engineering and economic opportunity may also constrain the actions of engineers. Remembering MacIntyre’s definition of character as placing “a certain kind of moral constraint on the personality of those who inhabit them,” the key questions to pursue include who can become the character who engineers and, what can the character of the engineer engineer when the prominent value is getting and keeping a job.⁸

References

¹ Fred Turner, “Don’t Be Evil: Fred Turner on Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers,” Logic Magazine, https://logicmag.io/03-dont-be-evil/.

² Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 27.

³ Carrie A. Rentschler, “Bystander Intervention, Feminist Hashtag Activism, and the Anti-Carceral Politics of Care,” Feminist Media Studies 17, no. 4 (2017): 568.

⁴ Tara McLennan, “Hashtag “Sunset,”” The International Journal of the Image 7, no. 1 (2016): 33,  doi://10.18848/2154-8560/CGP/v07i01/33-43.

⁵ Shirin Vossoughi, Paula K Hooper, and Meg Escudé, “Making through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity,” Harvard Educational Review 86, no. 2 (2016): 207.

⁶ Turner, “Don’t Be Evil.”

⁷ Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018), Loc. 286, Kindle.

⁸ MacIntyre, After Virtue, 27.

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MITH 610 introduces students to current topics and critical issues in the field of Digital Studies. MITH itself functions not just as a space for the class, but also as a laboratory for experimenting with digital methods, and getting acquainted with people on campus (and in the DC area) who are doing work in the digital humanities.

For example this past Spring MITH 610 was broken up into 3 modules: Reimagining the Archive, Media Archaeology and Data Stories. In the Data Stories module we worked with students to understand how social media APIs operate, and explored how to do data collection and documentation while being guided by the principles of Advocacy by Design. Advocacy by Design centers ethical questions of why we are interested in pursuing particular sets of research questions in order to better understand how we carry out the research, interpret our findings, and speculate about possible futures that they entail. These conversations compel us to ask how people are represented in, or are subjects of, academic work. Who reads and uses our work? Who collaborates and contributes to our work? Providing a welcoming and collaborative space for asking these questions is a central part of MITH’s vision for digital studies at UMD, which you can also see reflected in its core values.

One somewhat mundane, but never the less significant, challenge we often face when working as a group with different technologies is what we call The Laptop Problem. Fortunately, students come to class with a computer of some kind. It’s almost a given, especially in a field like digital studies. On the plus side this means that students arrive to class already equipped with the tools of the trade, and we don’t need to manage an actual set of machines for them to use. However on the down side everyone comes with a slightly different machine and/or operating system which can make it very difficult for us to craft a single set of comprehensive instructions for. Much time can be lost time simply getting everyone set up to begin the actual work.

We were also stymied by another problem. In introducing social media data collection we wanted to go where the Digital Humanities generally (and wisely) fears to tread: The Command Line. In the previous Media Archaeology module, students examined and experimented with MITH’s Vintage Computing collection, which involved working directly with older hardware and software interfaces, and reflecting on the affordances that they offer. If you are curious about what this involved here’s a short Twitter thread by Caitlin Christian-Lamb that describes (with some great pictures) some of her work in this module:

We thought it would be compelling to introduce social media data collection by using the command line interface, as an example of a (relatively) ancient computer interface that continues to be heavily used even today, particularly in Cloud environments. But because of The Laptop Problem we weren’t guaranteed everyone would have the same command line available to them, or that they would even have access to it. One way of solving The Laptop Problem is to provide access to a shared virtual environment of some kind where software is already installed. This is when we ran across Google Cloud Shell.

Since the University of Maryland uses Google’s GSuite for Education for email and other services, students are (for better or worse) guaranteed to have (at least one) Google account. As part of Google Cloud they offer any account holder the ability to go to a URL https://console.cloud.google.com/cloudshell which automatically launches a virtual machine in the cloud, and give you a terminal window directly in your browser for interacting with it. It is a real Debian Linux operating system, which can used without having to install any software at all.

We developed a short exercise that walked students through how to launch Google Cloud Shell, get comfortable with a few commands, install the twarc utility, and use it to collect some Twitter data directly from Twitter’s API. twarc has been developed as part of MITH’s involvement in the Documenting the Now project, and allowed  students to collect Twitter data matching a query of their choosing, store it in the native JSON format that Twitter themselves make available, and download it for further analysis.

Describing all the intricate details of this data flow was well beyond the scope of the class. But it did present an opportunity for demystifying how Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) take their shape on the web, and to describe how these services make structured data available, and to who. Matt likes to refer to refer to this experience as Little Big Data. To bookend the exercise students wrote about what they chose to collect and why, and reflected on what the collected data, and the experience of collecting it said to them in the shape of a short data story. Look for a few of these stories in subsequent posts here on the MITH blog.

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The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. The Endowment awards grants to top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers.These grants are highly competitive and involve a rigorous peer-review process to ensure that the projects represent the highest level of humanities quality and public engagement.

The $217,000 grant will fund the creation of a comprehensive online collection of early educational public radio content from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB). The forerunner of CPB and its arms, NPR and PBS, the NAEB served as the primary organizer, developer, and distributor for noncommercial broadcast production and analysis between 1925 and 1981. These broadcasts, mostly stemming from university and public school-run radio stations, provide an in-depth look at the engagements and events of American history, as they were broadcast to and received by the general public in the twentieth century. According to the project’s Lead Advisor, Josh Shepperd of Catholic University and Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force,

“The National Association of Educational Broadcasters recordings provide valuable context into cultural, political, and less-studied, educational discourses going back to the New Deal, and associated documents help media scholars to trace the origin of script development, audience research, and genres that we associate with both public media and cable television – science, travel, food, history, and journalism programming.”

The NAEB systematically preserved its history across over a hundred boxes of documents and 5,000 reels of tape, but the organization split its archive, depositing its papers in Wisconsin and the recordings in Maryland. Archival audiovisual media has been collected and maintained separately from other kinds of (primarily textual) archival sources, and these ‘split’ collections mean that researchers must often discover and manually reunite audiovisual collections and their related materials if they want to understand a broadcast not just as an audiovisual object, but as a medium that relays information within a set of historical contexts (time, place, related events, etc.). Unlocking the Airwaves will reunite the split NAEB collections, develop an open and comprehensive web portal for them, and tell the story of early educational and public broadcasting.

By coordinating the expertise of archivists, humanities researchers, and digital humanists, Unlocking the Airwaves will deliver enhanced access to important, mostly hidden, archival audiovisual materials by linking split hybrid paper/audiovisual collections together, and providing a search engine for the linked collections, enabling users to simultaneously search both the documents and sounds of the NAEB. The resulting resource will finally realize the potential of the collections of the NAEB for exploration and study by educators, scholars, journalists, documentarians, genealogists, and the broader public.

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Monitoring Climate Data on the Web

Ray Cha
Software Project Manager
Environmental Data and Governance Initiative

MITH Conference Room
11:00 am – 12:00 pm, 2:00 – 3:00 pm

Please join us on May 10 from 11:00 am – 12:00 pm in MITH for a presentation by Ray Cha, who is helping direct the efforts of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) to monitor federal websites that provide access to information about climate change, the environment, and energy. The presentation and discussion will be followed in the afternoon (2 – 3 pm) with an informal demonstration to get a more hands on understanding of how EDGI’s volunteers work. Participants are welcome to attend either (or both) sessions.

EDGI is an international network of academics and non-profits addressing potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy, and to the scientific research infrastructure built to investigate, inform, and enforce them. Dismantling this infrastructure—which ranges from databases to satellites to models for climate, air, and water—could imperil the public’s right to know, the United States’ standing as a scientific leader, corporate accountability, and environmental protection.

EDGI is monitoring changes to thousands of federal environmental agency webpages to document and analyze the way environmental data either disappears or otherwise changes, sometimes in subtle but significant ways.

More about EDGI’s work monitoring federal government websites can be found in their recent Changing the Digital Climate: How Climate Change Web Content is Being Censored Under the Trump Administration.

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