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fandinod
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May 3, 2018

CHI AnnouncementsCHI Fellowship ProgramCHI Grad Fellow Post

Launch of Tokyo 6420!

May 3, 2018 | By | No Comments

I am pleased to announce the launch of Tokyo 6420, a digital project on the Tokyo Olympic Games. Taking the name from the combination of the 1964 Games and the upcoming 2020 Games, Tokyo 6420 attempts to link together the story and cultural legacy of the Olympics in Tokyo with the urban transformation of the post-war Japanese capital. The Tokyo 1964 Games were one of the most successful Olympics of all time and it is this legacy that is driving the 2020 Games. As with 1964, 2020 is being seen as a redefinition of Tokyo and to a large extent, Japan itself. How the Olympics changed the face of Tokyo and how they are remembered and depicted in Japanese culture are the core questions this project is seeking to answer. Although this project has launched, it is an ongoing effort to chronicle the past and future of the Olympics in Tokyo and will be continually updated until the torch is extinguished at the close of the 32nd Olympiad in August 2020.

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mcgrat85
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May 3, 2018

CHI Grad Fellow PostCHI Project Info

Announcing the Launch of the The Novelty Project

May 3, 2018 | By | No Comments

I am pleased to announce the launch of my CHI Project, “The Novelty Project.” This is more of a soft launch, really; this collaboration between Arend Hintze, Devin Higgins, and I has been in the works for the past two years now, yielding one forthcoming publication and a grant. I’ve built a website to serve as a companion landing page—where we will expand on information published, include information that we weren’t able to fit into our published work, and include some of the weirder findings that we uncover.

Novelty looks like this!

The major work of my year as a CHI Fellow was not the building of the public site, but the development of a 20th-century Corpus with the HathiTrust Research Center. Our team was awarded an HTRC Advanced Collaborative Support Grant last July, providing us access to in-copyright works in HTRC’s holdings via a Virtual Machine. Throughout the year, we worked with the incredibly talented and patient Eleanor Dickson to develop a corpus of 20th-century novels, split into two categories: canonical and non-canonical. Our goal was to build a corpus that would be large enough for us to a.) replicate our initial proof of concept, and b.) consider some of our more provocative hypotheses regarding literary modernism, p

ostmodernism, and the periodization of the 20th-century. Our goal in developing two, contrapuntal corpora was to get at the dynamic identified by Algee-Hewitt et. al in Pamphlet 11 from the Stanford Lit Lab, “Canon/Archive: Large-scale Dynamics in the Literary Field.” Our hope was to develop both an admittedly inclusive canon of the 20th-century novel, and an archive against or within which we might understand the canonical, and broader dynamics of the field.

One might suspect that determining the canonicity of our texts would be an impossible text—after all, “what’s in,” and “what’s out,” has been the subject of much heated debate (to put it lightly). In fact, canonicity was rather straightforward, thanks to a useful tool created by Nathaniel Conroy called Metacanon.* Metacanon collects citation scores from Google Scholar, JSTOR, The New York Times, and several other sources to calculate the most influential novels of any given time period. We used Metacanon’s date-range function to develop our canon list, gathering the top 100 most frequently cited works of fiction published within each decade of the 20th-century. This provided us a relatively even spread of publication dates (though the turn-of-the-century skews Jamesian). Once we had identified these texts, we isolated the novels from our results, queried HathiTrust’s holdings, selected a preferred edition, et voila: a canon corpus.

From there, we set out to build our corpus of non-canonical novels. This corpus isolates a hazy middle in the literary field—novels that were important or influential enough to have been digitized, but not important or influential enough to have been cited by scholars. Because we were not starting from a pre-determined list, but working from within the disorientingly rich and complex Hathi library this process turned out to be rather tedious: how does one identify a novel according to MARC Records? How to distinguish between a book published during the 20th-century and a book republished in the 20th-century? (Dickens, it seems, gets a reprint every five years). What of novels spread over multiple volumes—a fad that, fortunately for us, appeared to be falling out of fashion after 1900? How do we identify—and eliminate—works of criticism that are about novels, but not novels themselves? And what difference does a collection of short stories make in our results? Which versions do we keep, and why? Each of these questions, their answers, and our corresponding action has the potential to change our results. And while these finely-tuned details may make little difference at scale, they mattered significantly to us as we determined what-to-add and what-to-cut.

We are in the process of running these texts through our Novelty Filter, in hopes of turning to Phase III of this project over the summer. An online landing page is, unfortunately, a poor substitute for the work that our team has completed. But it provides us a space to consider some weird stuff—such as our comparison between Bestsellers and Prizewinners—and to provide our audience a chance to interact with our (forthcoming) data at a more granular level.

A final note of thanks to HTRC, and, especially, Eleanor Dickson. This project would have been impossible without Eleanor’s efforts, and without HTRC’s generosity. I’m eager to see how The Novelty Project continues to unfold, and hope that you’ll follow along with us.

 

 

*While we made great use of Metacanon.org, it appears that the site is no longer functioning?

Nicole Raslich
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May 2, 2018

CHI Grad Fellow Post

Announcing the Launch of Protecting Our Past, an Introduction to Cultural Heritage Policy and Law

May 2, 2018 | By | No Comments

Protecting Our Past: Cultural Heritage Policy and Law is now live!

It is exciting to announce the launch of my first site, Protecting Our Past: Cultural Heritage Policy and Law. Since September, I have coded and gathered information to create this site which contains reference material about cultural heritage preservation laws. Currently, it contains the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the National Historic Preservation Act and the UNESCO World Heritage Convention. In the future, I plan to add other preservation laws as well as some interactive mitigation activities and sample MOA’s.

The majority of the information available in this site can be found on sites across the internet but I have compiled them here, along with their links and easy to find definitions that are often hidden within the laws themselves. Throughout my career as an archaeologist, I have often found it difficult to obtain pieces of information I needed when trying to mitigate an inadvertent discovery. The exact definition of what constitutes an ‘undertaking’ in federal compliance terms frequently alludes the local governments who are required to comply. These were some of my motivations for creating this website.

landing page of PoPCHPLThe site is simply laid out, with a landing page and then a page for each policy discussed which include summaries of the policies and then links to their governmental homepages. This site is currently hosted on GitHub (but that may change in the future) and was created using a BootStrap template. This culmination of my introduction to website creation and coding went far better than I ever hoped for. When I started in September, the idea of coding my own website scared me to death. Now that it is live, I cannot wait to continue to improve it and add to it.

I hope this serves as a reference guide for anyone new to preservation policy and law.

Cody M
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May 2, 2018

CHI Fellowship ProgramCHI Grad Fellow Post

Launching: Queer Intersections: Visualizing the LGBTQ Video Game Archive!

May 2, 2018 | By | No Comments

I’m thrilled to finally announce the launch of Queer Intersections: Visualizing the LGBTQ Video Game Archive! This collection of visualizations reveals trends in LGBTQ representation in video games from the 1980s to the 2000s using an intersectional lens, particularly to look at intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and genre. Currently the project consists of 16 interactive visualizations, and more will be added in the future in order to continue breaking down the larger trends already present in the data.

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dixonel7
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May 2, 2018

CHI Grad Fellow Post

Launch of Queer Continuum!

May 2, 2018 | By | No Comments

My project, Queer Continuum is now live here!

Queer Continuum is a theoretical project I have been working on over the course of the last two years. As I have worked on my PhD in rhetoric and writing, it has often struck me that the rhetoric and writing discipline places a great deal of value on finished products. To create a finished project, we often rely on linear logics and text. Indeed, lines and lines of alphabetic text are currently how I am getting this message across to you now. My project, Queer Continuum, is aimed at challenging that value system from a queer perspective. A few years ago, I came across a passage from Ann Wysocki, who wrote, “How might the straight lines of type we have inherited on page after page of books articulate to other kinds of lines, assembly lines and lines of desks in classrooms” (14)? Or, I might, add, to gravestones? While reading through this text I was already thinking about what it means to be a queer body that writes and composes; in what ways does linear composition perpetuate an inherent valuation of straightness? How might the teaching of linear composing practices that lead to finished projects stifle other kinds of composing; queerer kinds of composing? In what ways does that stifling of queer work lead to the stifling of queer people?For a visual representation, take a look at this infographic I made.

Thus, Queer Continuum is a digital project that has no real beginning or end– it is an exercise in anti-finality, in circular logics, in an avoidance of a finished product. Prepare to be a little frustrated. Each page of this site include some theoretical framing from me, drawing from specific scholars in queer and digital rhetorics, or images and videos I have also created. There is no one way to navigate the site, and it’s possible you will interact with repeats of the site long before you see every page. The site only ends when you decide you’re finished; there are myriad ways to navigate the project.

I built this project using Twine, self-described as an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. Learning to use Twine has been a challenge, as I have discussed in previous blog posts, because it engages in coding languages like html and css, but also in others specific to Twine, like the one I used called Harlowe. While this project might look a little #basic in design, it exists after hours and hours of labor and learning– I’m happy with this version of the project and hope to add to it in the future.

Putting together this project has allowed me to continue to question what it means to compose queerly in an academic world that so values linearity and finished projects. I feel a bit at-odds even presenting the project as it is, because such a launch feels final, and therefore counterintuitive to my argument. Still, there is much work I can do on this project and I look forward to doing so. My hope with this project is that it will open up space for readers to consider the ways in which a reliance on linearity in composition is detrimental to those of us who see the world differently–queerly– than others.

carlinek
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May 2, 2018

CHI Grad Fellow Post

Launch of Mapping Consumers!

May 2, 2018 | By | No Comments

My project, Mapping Consumers in the Black South African Press, is now live at this address!

Mapping Consumers is built with data I collected from two South African newspapers, Bantu World and Umlindi we Nyanga in the 1930s. The 1930s were an important period in the history of South African newspaper, advertising, and consumer culture. This was the period when white-owned consumer products companies began sustained advertising campaigns in newspapers for black South African readers. Testimonial advertisements in these papers offer a window onto who the consumers of these products were, how they imagined themselves as consumers, and how advertisers wanted to represent the ideal, “modern” African consumer.

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Brian Geyer
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May 2, 2018

CHI Fellowship ProgramCHI Grad Fellow PostCHI Project Info

Launching: No Mud Huts

May 2, 2018 | By | No Comments

Today I officially launch No Mud Huts: an open anthropological journal about Kenya’s tech industry! Through this site I intend to contribute to the open science research movement as a part of my broader support for an open access approach to scientific publishing.

Motivations

I am about to complete my comprehensive exams and will soon be moving to Kenya to undergo a year-long data collection period, during which time I will be writing about my research on this site. Because of limitations regarding participant confidentiality, I will not be publishing all of my field notes and collected data, as would normally be expected of a scientist contributing to the open science movement. Instead, I will be working to write preliminary analyses of those notes and data, in order to strike a balance the ethics of conducting anthropological research with the ethics of ensuring one’s scientific production is accessible to as large an audience as possible.

I intend for this site to shine a light on the processes involved in “doing anthropology” for those who are interested. It is my hope that this site is viewed favorably and intently by those professionals with whom I am honored to conduct research in Kenya, but others who may be interested in what exactly it is anthropologists do and how at least one of us thinks.

Site Overview

No Mud HutsThe site’s layout is rather straightforward, with a landing page, About page, and the hosted blog. Adding new posts is as simple as creating a new Markdown file with the proper opening material, which prompts its inclusion in the blog post list. Despite being a static website hosted by GitHub Pages, No Mud Huts integrates several other open-source tools to allow for quick design changes and an automated comments section complete with Gravatar profile image integration. Comments can be easily disabled for individual posts as well. As the blog grows, the theme I’ve used for setting the website’s aesthetic design has an option to quickly implement post categorizations for blog post lists, as well as the ability to generate suggested links at the bottom of each post.

 

Julia DeCook
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May 2, 2018

CHI AnnouncementsCHI Fellowship ProgramCHI Grad Fellow Post

Launching: Networks of Hate

May 2, 2018 | By | No Comments

After a long seven months of dreaming, planning, and making, I’m happy to announce that my project, “Networks of Hate: Visualizing Extremist Celebrity Networks” is now live!

The motivation behind building this website was to visualize the ways in which extremist celebrities are connected in terms of the larger movement that they identify with or have been identified as belonging to. Many have noted how groups like the Manosphere and movements like GamerGate served as gateway ideologies/movements to more extremist groups like those that fall under the Alt Right or Alt Lite label, and the goal of my project was to visualize the networks of celebrities that these ideologies often travel on. To build the visualizations, I used R to make the interactive networks.

 Why celebrities?

The new extremism is notable for their use of digital platforms in community building and mobilization. Because of this, there are a number of “celebrities” in the movements themselves that serve as vehicles of these ideological messages, and visualizing how these celebrities are connected can demonstrate how the beliefs of these groups intersect. Of course, celebrities are individuals, but they speak and represent the groups that they are affiliated with to larger audiences. Extremist celebrities in the 21st century not only forge connections but expose groups to one another like brokers. Using platforms like YouTube, Twitter, reddit, and many others, these extremist celebrities forge connections between groups and seeing their group affiliations may illustrate the movement of these ideologies.

The home page gives a brief overview of the project and provides links to the networks themselves. The site is organized into four main pages and then four subpages under the “GROUPS” main page. The pages are as follows:

  1. HOME
  2. ABOUT
  3. GROUPS
    1. Alt Right
    2. Alt Lite
    3. Manosphere
    4. Gamergate
  4. CONTACT

HOME
As discussed above, “HOME” is the landing page where some cursory information is given about the project itself and the motivation behind it. This is an “at a glance” page and it includes links to the network visualizations on the landing page and an explanation of how to navigate the website.

ABOUT
A more in depth essay on the reasoning and motivation behind the project will be found on this page.

GROUPS
The main “GROUPS” page includes information about all of the groups and reasoning behind why they were included, and is titled “THE NEW EXTREMISM: Who’s Who?” to illuminate the purpose that these visualizations are meant to serve.

Alt Right
The first of the subpages includes a brief essay about the Alt Right, who the main players are, and presents the first visualization which includes all four of the umbrella groups that are included in the networks.

Alt Lite
The second of the subpages includes information about the Alt Lite, key players in the movement, and how it was borne out of the Alt Right – particularly after the Charlottesville Rally that resulted in the death of one counter protestor, the Alt Lite aimed to distance itself from overt white supremacy and instead is more focused on a nationalistic, “Western” civilization view. The network visualization on this page shows the connections between the Alt Lite and the Alt Right.

Manosphere
The third subpage is about The Manosphere, which is a web-based loosely connected collection of men’s rights activist websites, Pick Up Artistry spaces, and others. Groups that fall under this umbrella term include Mens Rights activist, r/TheRedPill, MGTOW, A Voice for Men, and others. Whether or not Incels has a place in the Manosphere is contested between the various groups. The Manosphere in particular has been pointed at as a gateway ideology, and this visualization illustrates the connections between the Manosphere and the Alt Lite.

Gamergate
The final subpage is about Gamergate, which was a harassment campaign targeted towards women gamers, game developers, and journalists, and culminated in a number of death and rape threats toward them. The communities where many of these harassment campaigns were enacted are still active and thriving, even if they have slightly receded from the limelight. A notable celebrity of this movement is Milo Yinnaopoulos, who then parlayed this fame in to being connected with the Alt Lite, Breitbart, and the Manosphere. This visualization presents the connections between Gamergate and the Alt Lite.

CONTACT
Just a page with a contact form, and nothing more.

Future Directions
I’m hoping to make more detailed visualizations in the future, like the specific groups that are connected since all of the groups I included in these initial visualizations are the broader umbrella terms. Also, my initial plan to have text pop up as one clicks on each node required a lot more technical knowledge than I could learn in a year, but I feel happy with the end result despite it being slightly different from my initial plan. Despite this, the website is a first glance at seeing how cultural flows and ideology are spread from celebrity to celebrity within these extremist groups, and future work can build off of these initial maps.

ellio252
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May 2, 2018

Uncategorized

Introducing “Moscow: The Corner of Communism and Capitalism”

May 2, 2018 | By | No Comments

Today, I officially launch my website, “Moscow: The Corner of Communism and Capitalism,” which uses my dissertation on temporary labor migration to Moscow to examine the interplay between communism and capitalism in Moscow. The project stemmed from both my dissertation research and my observations while living in Moscow. I was always struck by seeing the interplay of the Soviet socialist past and the Russian capitalist present in the architecture as I walked around Moscow. Moreover, I could see the logical outcomes of my dissertation topic spray painted on the concrete as advertisements for dormitory rooms and posted on fences as calls for temporary jobs that came with registration.

My website’s landing page provides an historical overview of temporary labor migration to Moscow, tracing the origins of these practices to end of the nineteenth century. In the imperial period, peasants made their way to the capital to work in factories and send cash, needed for redemption payments, back to families. The opening essay also introduces the Soviet internal passport and domicile registration systems that governed rural to urban migration from 1932 to the end of the Soviet Union. A timeline then provides information on the development of Moscow, as seen through the lens of temporary labor migration and population growth, from 1971 to 2002. The second page explains the changing places of origins of migrants and provides a map. While migrants originally arrived from the areas near Moscow, the near complete depletion of the youthful rural population meant migrants from Siberia, the other republics of the Soviet Union, and even countries beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union replaced arrived in larger numbers from the mid-1980s onward.

The next two pages use a series of graphs to explain population change. The first of these pages explains the centrality of migration to population growth by providing information on birth and death rates as well as the tempo of migration to the capital. If births provided 10,000 new residents annually, migration provided 50,000 to 70,000. The following page looks at the reception of migrants in the capital, paying particular attention to nationality and the changing role of citizenship. The last two pages are case studies – one of automobile factories, the other of the Olympics – of work places in which migrants dominated. I also explain the afterlife of these locations in the post-Soviet period.

It is my hope that my website will provoke its users to consider several important questions, such as the (dis)continuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet periods as well as the Soviet Union’s relationship to the history of postwar Europe, particularly in regards to migration. Before at last introducing my website, I must thank several people. Ethan Watrall, the director of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Program, and this year’s cohort of CHI fellows have helped me every step of the way. My advisor, Lewis Siegelbaum, has helped me conceptualize the research that I display here (and has also written extensively on the car factories that I discuss on my website). Lastly, Ramya Swayamprakash encouraged me to apply for the CHI Fellowship after sharing her positive experiences as a CHI Fellow in the 2016-2017 academic year.

Without any further ago, I give you “Moscow: The Corner of Communism and Capitalism”: https://ellio252.github.io/Moscow_Migration/.

ellio252
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April 30, 2018

CHI Grad Fellow Post

Migrants and Muscovites: The Memory of Migration

April 30, 2018 | By | No Comments

I am writing this blog from Moscow, the place that my website (now almost fully functional) is about. I find it appropriate to discuss all the ways that I have seen migration play out over the course of my various stays here. I first came to Moscow in June 2011 as an undergraduate with one year of Russian under my belt. I’m not sure what I expected when my plane took off from JFK that summer evening, but I was shocked by the streets of Moscow. Growing up in the Bronx, I feel more at home in urban environments, but Moscow’s streets had kiosks everywhere. You could buy everything: fast food, cigarettes, beer, newspaper, SIM cards. It is probably more accurate to say that there was nothing that you couldn’t buy. It seemed to me that Russians ran many of these makeshift shops, but clearly migrants from elsewhere in the former Soviet Union had joined them.

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