We — academics, humanists, Caribbeanists — have to make information and tools available to others in our discipline so that the discipline may itself survive to serve our students and, perhaps by extension, the larger public.
However, resources also have to be made available to others in the discipline of Digital humanities in order to ensure that the scholarship is available for students, research and other purposes.
His insistence on lengthy captions to add dimensions to his already-striking images on Instagram means he deliberately pushes against the boundaries of how the social media platform is “supposed” to be used, creating what Moya Bailey calls “digital alchemy.”
Digital alchemy involves utilizing digital tools (ie. Social media etc) for something other than what it is commonly used for. For example, many people view social media as a platform to post pictures and promote items. Digital alchemy in that sense may be using these platforms to create groups where persons with similar issues can provide support to one another or promote social change.
Earhart speaks of leveraging “materials and knowledge … to change the social position of people of color”; in particular for the digital humanities, to use the “space of the Internet [to] allow those who [have] been silenced to have a voice”
Resources can be utilized to improve social positions and circumstances. Digital humanities can facilitate this by using the internet to help advocate for those who have been silenced
So it’s quantitative evidence that seems to show something, but it’s the scholar’s knowledge of the surrounding debates and historiography that give this data any meaning. It requires a lot of interpretive work.
Quantitative evidence is useful in digital humanities because it provides the basis for further analysis. However, it is the humanists knowledge and interpretation that actually gives the data any meaning. A lot of interpretive work is required which results in informed conclusions and assumptions.
And it’s the same with humanists. With a source, like a film or a work of literature, you’re not extracting features in order to analyze them; you’re trying to dive into it, like a pool, and understand it from within.
Humanists think of data differently unlike others in different fields. They do not think of their source information as simply data, as this implies that the content collected or researched is strictly for analysis.
The effort to preserve and the desire for access have both changed the text now recorded. Together, preservation and access make archives malleable and dynamic rather than static.
Once more, this reminds me of the case in a previous reading. There was the initiative of having smart big data, as it gets the best of both worlds. In this case of archives, having both preservation and access (including certain refined collections) also gets the best of sides and results in archives being dynamic.
Digital platforms encourage experimentation and facilitate changing design decisions.
Digital archives as opposed to traditional archives facilitates certain aspects such as design and promotes experimentation. Digitally, designs can constantly be updated because of the ease of simply editing; unlike traditional archives where there are physical representations of documents where content cannot be experimented with that easily.
. The only way to know if your results are useful or wildly off the mark is to have a general idea of what you should be seeing.
Having a generalized idea of what your corpus is about or what you may be seeing categorised is helpful. It helps you to identify words etc. which does not belong in a specific topic. It will also assist in understanding the usefulness of information derived and aid in making conclusions and connections.
If you wanted to topic model one fairly short document, you might be better off with a set of highlighters or a good pdf annotation tool. Topic modeling is built for large collections of texts.
Topic modeling is better used on a large scale. It improves efficiency and allows one to understand and organise large collections of text. If you need to organise a smaller scale of text, it is better to manually highlight aspects of importance.
Topic modeling is a form of text mining, a way of identifying patterns in a corpus. You take your corpus and run it through a tool which groups words across the corpus into ‘topics’.
Topic modeling can be summarised as a way of identifying similar patterns (ie. similar words etc.) in a collection of written texts. It derives relevant information and brings light to hidden word patterns
Of course, there are ways to deal with this, and Machine Learning will no doubt be one of the keys to these challenges
The evolution of technology will prove to be a solution to the time consuming nature of smart data. Once efficiency is improved, in my opinion, smart data would be widely preferred to big data.
Another important distinction is between data and metadata. Here, the term “data” refers to the part of a file or dataset which contains the actual representation of an object of inquiry, while the term “metadata” refers to data about that data: metadata explicitly describes selected aspects of a dataset, such as the time of its creation, or the way it was collected, or what entity external to the dataset it is supposed to represent.
In reference to one of my past readings "understanding metadata", It is quite useful to encounter the differentiation and connection between the two. Data is basically the "original" content while metadata is specific data about that actual or original representation.
smart data tends to involve smaller volumes of carefully encoded, very clean text.
Personally, I find smart data to be more efficient because of its more refined quality, even if it can be more time costly. But yes, I also agree with the initiative of having smart big data, as it gets the best of both worlds
The work that we make, McGann tells us, “is not the achievement of one’s desire: it is the shadow of that desire.”[2
I strongly agree. Often, especially in the industries where art is concerned, what is actually made is just a "watered down" version of many desires. What people may perceive that piece of work as is not all there is to it. For example, persons may look at a painting and say "It's very pretty" while the artist himself viewed it as an entire storyline while trying to put it into object form.
The distance between our wish and our object is often so great
This is very true noting that our imaginations can often run wild and create the literal most. However, creating these wishes into an object may prove to be challenging because of many factors such as processes that need to be done
Journals will move into the publication of born-digital work also, integrating print and digital formats.
I love the initiative of having both printed and digital formats. This will make works more accessible as well as provide efficiency in terms of research. It is very innovative and quite an excellent opportunity and would cater for everyone.
Noble argues that a company that plays this kind of role in our lives must be subject to the checks of government regulation. Without that, we have no recourse except to hope that Google abides by its founding motto: Don’t be evil. Given Noble’s research, we have plenty of evidence that the company cannot.
Personally this area was found quite hilarious 😂, with the motto being "Don't be evil" but the reality of it is true. We trust "Google" with a lot of information about our personal lives, depend on them for information and they create the algorithms, but, who's to say that they can't one day decide to go against said motto. Influencing algorithms in a negative way can lead to a change in people's mentality, offend others and much more. Them being subjected to government regulation checks will provide more security and comfort so to speak.
But the poor and working-class people of color cut off and isolated from the rest of the city by a swoop of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway can tell you that Moses’s roads are broken. Infrastructure is a human thing and thus a political thing. Read critically, such systems reveal the ways that power and privilege are normalized such that they extend and consolidate patriarchy, white supremacy, and wealth inequality.
Agreed. In society, even today, it can be seen that infrastructure in certain areas of a country are more advanced and developed than others. I believe that interpersonal relationships and beliefs of those in power play a great part. The places which are more developed infrastructurally are most often than not associated with the city life or where a certain government party wins, ignoring the areas that actually needs attention.