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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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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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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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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For the past two years our work with our partners on Documenting the Now has deepened MITH’s longstanding interest in how archives are assembled and studied as an integral part of digital humanities research. Much of MITH’s previous attention in this area has focused on the construction of archives in the web–or rather, using the web as a means for publishing for, and engaging with, particular audiences of humanities scholars. As part of our efforts to help document the Ferguson Protests, Baltimore Uprising, and the Black Lives Matter movement, we have been drawn into conversations about how to build archives of the web, specifically of social media content such as Twitter. This engagement has led us directly into conversations about the positionality of archival work, and how ethics and our own values get built into collections and applications.

Thanks to the efforts of Bergis Jules and Vernon Mitchell (the projects’ two co-PIs) we have had the opportunity to engage with and learn from activists in Ferguson on several occasions. These activists described how they used social media as part of their work in Ferguson, and how social media records fit into their lived experience, not just as protestors, but as citizens and people. Most importantly these activists, along with an assembled group of scholars, helped us think together about what it means to do memory work as activists, archivists and social media researchers. It is not simply good enough for our project to document the events in Ferguson without engaging with and giving back to the communities we are documenting. While methods such as participant observation and action research are helpful guides, there is still much work to be done in applying them as humanists and archivists to communities on the web.

The web has often been thought of as a shared public space, or as Lawrence Lessig described it in 1999, a commons:

The internet is a commons: the space that anyone can enter, and take what she finds without the permission of a librarian, or a promise to pay. The net is built on a commons — the code of the World Wide Web, HTML, is a computer language that lays itself open for anyone to see — to see, and to steal, and to use as one wants. If you like a web page, then all major browsers permit you to reveal its source, download it, and change it as you wish. It’s out there for the taking; and what you take leaves as much for me as there was before.

It is astonishing how much has changed in how we think about the web since Lessig wrote those words almost 20 years ago. Far from being simply a commons that we can all take from equally, the web is now an unevenly distributed sociotechnical space, and an essential part of contemporary life. Web content exists along continuums of access and privilege, instead of in a binary, public/private state. Social media platforms are perfect examples of how communities can form in pockets the web. These communities aren’t simply part of a public commons or locked up in corporate walled gardens. We identified a real concrete need for more conversation and shared practices of how to work as scholars and archivists in an ethical, participatory way, while respecting the agency of the web communities we are attempting to remember.

With this goal in mind we invite you to join us in New York City at the Ethics and Archiving the Web forum. While the program is fixed, there are some spots available during the day long workshops if you would like to share your own work or projects with us. We hope to see you there!

Please get in touch with Ed Summers at MITH with any questions about the Documenting the Now project, or MITH’s involvement in the forum.

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