Education has begun to embrace the digital environment, but institutions and instructors are faced with the decision to accept (or not) the possibilities that this new space offers to “practice freedom”. On its surface, one may wonder why a university or instructor would not choose freedom, but this question requires the deconstruction of everything we thought we knew about instruction from the definition of a “course,” to the roles of teachers and students, as well as the location of authority.  Digital pedagogy forces us to examine each of these ideas, including the very concepts of “digital” and “pedagogy”.

Digital

In a recent article in the Digital Humanities Quarterly, Paul Fyfe asks if digital pedagogy must be practiced in an electronic environment and urges us to move beyond the notion that digital pedagogy is solely concerned with technology. Two problems attend this association: (1) technology can make it easier to teach in less, rather than more, engaging ways (i.e., the overuse of PowerPoint), and (2) the use of technology as another tool to do what was already done, thus removing the productively disruptive possibilities inherent in many technologies.[1]  Therefore, educators need to consider which electronic elements they will include in their course design, how they might be used to rethink the way teaching and learning take place, and how they might apply digital pedagogy even in “unplugged” classes.  At its core, digital pedagogy is about hacking – altering, adapting, and making use of technology or “features of a system.”[2]

Pedagogy

A teacher is not necessarily a pedagogue, and someone who specializes in education understands the institution but not necessarily pedagogy. So what is pedagogy? It is the study of learning understanding the elements of timeliness, mindfulness, and improvisation that instructors consciously use to facilitate meaningful exchanges in (and outside) the classroom. According to Sean Michael Morris, author of “Decoding Digital Pedagogy, Pt 1: Beyond the LMS,” “pedagogy experiments relentlessly, honoring a learning that’s lifelong.”[3] Digital pedagogy, in particular is important, not just because education seeks to embrace and utilize the digital world, but also because it is open to improvisation, to trying new things, and to inviting students into the process of crafting the instructional approach in this new space.

The Location of Authority

The digital environment forces us to rethink where authority lies and consider how we might move beyond the “flipped classroom” toward participant pedagogy, in which students are actively engaged in shaping instructional methodology. For this to happen, however, instructors must be willing to enter the classroom as participants as much as students must be willing to take ownership of their own learning. Once teachers and students are able to negotiate the location of authority and co-create a community of learners, they are equipped to address the subject matter with creativity, flexibility, and address the products of their study and collaboration to a larger audience beyond class participants. At that point, digital learning expands the original boundaries of the course to have farther-reaching outcomes than individual students’ grades.   What began as an isolated college course becomes meaningful on a grander scale because of it lives in a digital landscape.

How, then, do we become digital pedagogues?

• Devote time to “researching, practicing, writing about, presenting on, and teaching digital pedagogies”[4]
• Forget what you thought you knew about teaching
• Continually challenge yourself to seek out the new, the novel, and the unknown in your field, the usage of technology, and interrelated ideas in other fields
• Engage your students in the process of crafting your pedagogy
• Be open to change, to flip the classroom, and to take your instructional methodology into new, potentially uncharted, places.

The power of digital pedagogy lies in its innovative and disruptive nature, which urges scholars to re-examine educational structures long taken for granted. Courses burst out of their original containers as students and teachers alike discover links between and among various bodies of knowledge, thereby undermining arbitrary disciplinary borders.  Most importantly, digital pedagogy compels practitioners to search out new ways to engage students in the creative analysis of subject matter and together with them “discover how to participate in the transformation of [our] world.”

An Open Access, Born Digital Edited Collection

 In 2008, Kate Eichorn wrote: “To write in a digital age is to write in the archive” (1). She reflects on how the ubiquitous nature of “the archive” may be “inflected in our writing, especially in emerging genres of writing ” (1).  In other words, archives have changed the way we compose  – our writing and ourselves – in a digital age. We are composing and being composed by archives. Additionally, while the pervasive nature of archives is generally acknowledged among humanities scholars working in the digital realm, there does not seem to be a general consensus about what digital archives are or how they differ from digital libraries, collections or repositories.

For this edited collection, we invite articles that theorize archives within the digital humanities. We envision that this collection will contribute to discussions about the archival turn in humanities scholarship. Possible questions for discussion might include, but are not limited to:

• How are we theorizing digital archives?
• How are we drawing from the work of digital archivists as we build our own archives and conduct digital archival research?
• How do digital archives mediate how we write/compose?
• How do we differentiate between digital archives/repositories/libraries? Why are these distinctions important?
• What is the role/function/purpose of archives within the digital humanities?
• How are digital archives being used for cross/interdisciplinary work?
• How are digital archival objects material? What is the value in thinking of such objects as material entities with complex histories and identities of their own?
• How do we build complex digital archives that describe and house objects? How do we provide access to such digital objects?
• How are scholars decolonizing archives? How can we build more archives along the lines of the Trust and Technology project developed in Australia?
• How do we build participatory digital archives (such as the project being developed by Liza Potts: http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/2012/09/upcoming-project-in-participatory-memory-will-focus-on-creating-interactive-digital-archives/)?
• How are digital archives being used by activists for social justice projects?
• How are digital archives theorized differently from material archives?
• What opportunities for decolonization do digital archives afford?
• How can digital archives make the process of selection and display transparent?

 Publication Format:

This born digital edited collection will be published on an open access platform that will incorporate rich community discussion. The collection will include an editors’ introduction and two sections: The first section –“Theorizing Digital Archives”– will contain articles of no more that 7000 words; this section will define what digital archives are and how they have helped shape the humanities in the past few decades. The second section – “Working with Digital Archives” – will contain case studies of no more than 3000 words. The section will describe authors’ work with particular digital archives and the affordances and challenges of working with such archives.

Abstract submission guidelines:

We invite authors to submit an abstract of no more than 500 words by May 1st 2013. Abstracts should be sent in .doc or .rtf format to Madhu Narayan at narayanm [at] msu [dot] edu. Please indicate whether your abstract is aimed for the first or second section of the collection.

Timeline:

Acceptance notifications will be sent out by June 10, 2013. Authors will be asked to submit their manuscripts by October 1^st 2013 for a first round of peer-review that will be open to the public, as well as other authors submitting to the collection. After this first round of peer review comes to an end on November 15^th, authors will be asked to revise their manuscripts. Final drafts of articles will be published by January 31st, 2014. All works will be released under a Creative Commons license.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Madhu Narayan at narayanm [at] msu [dot] edu.

Koh’s discussion of this postcolonial archive got me thinking about the different notions of archives that I have been writing lately. More specifically, I am interested in how the concept of the archive itself has been taken up by DH scholars. There seem to be divergent understandings of archives: archivists’ notions of this term seem to be markedly different from humanists’ understanding of it. For instance, in her introduction to a special issue on archives, space and power (available in Archivaria 61), Joan Schwartz writes about the “academic/archival divide.” She argues that “differering conceptions of the archive/ ‘archives’ are at the heart of the ironies of postmodern, post-structural, and postcolonial scholarship. The ‘disconnect’ or ‘slippage’ between “the archive” of this recent and burgeoning scholarship and ‘archives’ where archivists live and work has a great deal to do with misunderstandings about the relationship between records and power, and the presumed role of archives as spaces of power” (8). She points out that there is a difference between the “metaphorical archive” (as theorized by scholars such as Steedman, Richards, Derrida, Foucault and Taylor) and the “material archives” that archivists deal with on a daily basis.

Schwartz also points out that academic conversations about “the archive” are taking place without the input of archivists. However, as she puts it

“ultimately, what these examinations of “the archive” have to offer archivists working ‘in the real world of archives’ is an important critique of the knowledge/power nexus which archivists occupy. Their lessons are not pointed, specific, tailored to our needs; their caveats are embedded in their observations; their suggestions are written between the lines. It is our job-nay, our duty – to attend the conferences, read the journals, learn the vocabulary, cut through the jargon, better to understand the power we wield and how others in many important sectors of society see us” (9).

Schwartz calls upon archivists to work with scholars in other fields in order to understand more about theoretical/academic formulation of archives. She explains that such conversations are important because it would help archivists re-evaluate their own practices in the light of theoretical critiques about archives. It would also allow archivists to explain their practices to scholars whose ideas about archives – in addition to being mediated by theoretical concerns – is solely based on their experiences as users of archives.

Admittedly, the term “archive” is used to describe many things. An “archive” can be a place, a collection of documents or an institution that collects documents. Additionally, theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Richards, Tuhiwai-Smith would maintain that an archive is also a function, and an orientation/mindset towards collecting and creating knowledge. However, as Schwartz has pointed out, archives are more than an undifferentiated mass of documents and/or “knowledge.” Such a view obscures not only the complex set of arrangement and descriptive practices that help create archives, but it also writes out the careful planning and arrangement that goes into the creation of archival spaces.

I have been hearing more and more about what I think of as the “archives versus archives” debate. Last year, Katie Theimer wrote persuasively about the way in which the term archive is being co-opted in scholarly spaces (http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=2522). Matt Kirschenbaum recently tweeted about the “long, idealized, and ultimately problematic use of the term “archive” in #dh project building” (Feb 5, 2012). There, however, does not seem to be general understanding of how scholars in the digital humanities are theorizing “archives.” And if the term “archive” is problematic, then what alternatives can we use to describe our projects? And how do we learn more about this subject from archivists who build and sustain archives on a daily basis?

(P.S. On a related note, please watch this space for a CFP from me that invites digital humanities scholars to theorize and articulate their understandings of archives).

Fischer’s contention is interesting: the Leale report was “discovered” by researchers within the National archives because “(a) 19th-century professional knew about the Leale report and decided that, as a part of the Surgeon General’s correspondence, it was worth keeping in the nation’s collections.” For Fischer, nothing can be “discovered” in an archive because it has already been found by an archivist who then makes materials available to researchers. She further points out that, given the scope and volume of the collections under their care, it would be difficult for archivists to know every minute item contained within a particular collection. Archivists, she explains, describe materials not at the item-level, but at the level of the collection. Such collection-level description gives us an idea of the “shape of the collection, who owned it, and what kinds of things it contains.” She also adds that “with the volume of materials, some collections may be undescribed or even described wrongly.” Fischer ends her piece by adding that “archival discoveries” quiet often depend on the labor of archivists and that researchers should be willing to acknowledge this labor rather than “devalue” it for the “sake of an exciting narrative.”

Two days later, The Atlantic published a rebuttal by Helena Iles Papaioannou titled: “Actually, Yes, It *Is* a Discovery If You Find Something in an Archive That No One Knew Was There.” [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/06/actually-yes-it-is-a-discovery-if-you-find-something-in-an-archive-that-no-one-knew-was-there/258812/]. Papaioannou argues that while she is cognizant of the important work done by archivists, it does not mean researchers cannot make archival discoveries. As she puts it: “if someone uncovers something unknown in living memory (or in the historiographical record) this counts as a discovery.” Since archivists do not process everything at the item-level, they did not know of the existence of the Leale report.  Papaioannou concedes that while it would be inappropriate to call something a discovery if an archivist knew of its existence, in the instance of the Leale Report, this was not the case. She also points out that there is no evidence that a 19^th century archivist actively made the decision to preserve the Leale Report since it is likely that the National Archives received the document as part of the Surgeon-General’s entire correspondence. Instead, what is more likely is that all of the Surgeon-General’s letters were kept and the Leale Report was simply one among those letters. Lastly, Papaioannou also points out that since the Leale Report was not cataloged in any of the National Archives’ finding aids, it was entirely unknown to researchers. Thus, the finding of the Leale report indeed qualifies as an archival discovery.

I see good arguments being made by both writers: on the one hand, Fischer is calling out the conceit of discovery. The idea of “discovery” has often been used to justify colonial conquests and erase the existence of people and knowledge that existed before those conquests. I see vestiges of the same attitude towards archival discoveries: it negates the labor of archivists and glorifies the labor of the historian or researcher. Archives are often seen as “unchartered” territory for researchers to discover or illuminate through their work. On the other hand, there is some weight to Papaioannou’s argument as well: something can be discovered if no one knows of its existence. On a fundamental level, however, I see this as a debate about archival context versus historical context. As Joan Schwartz (2006) has pointed out, what is deemed important by historians may not be as significant to archivists and vice versa. The Leale Report may have just been another letter to the archivists who originally filed it*: it may have been preserved because it supplied information about aspects of Charles Leale’s work as the Surgeon-General. But for the researchers studying the Leale Report in the context of the life and death of Abraham Lincoln, its significance is amplified in a very different manner.

In the context of this discussion, I am wondering what it means to “discover” something in a digital context? Under what circumstances can something be called a “discovery” whilst doing digital archival research? How do narratives of digital discoveries silence or make digital labor invisible?

___________________________

*It should be noted that even though the Leale Report may have been deposited in the National Archives many decades after Charles Leale’s death, it would still not have been possible for the archivists of that period to predict its historical value: so much of history/historiography is about having a long view of the past that is often not available to those archivists who are under immense pressure to appraise and make sense of the large number of documents that flood their workplaces every day.

And universities, in the broadest sense, will need to rethink the relationship between the library, the university press, the information technology center, and the academic units within the institution, reimagining the funding model under which publishing operates and the institutional purposes that such publishing serves – but also, and crucially, reimagining the relationship between the academic institution and the surrounding culture.

In part, Fitzpatrick is right in that the challenges we face at the current moment are not technological, but rather social as she points to the necessity of restructuring the systems (e.g. who can serve as a peer, notions of authorship, etc.) that we currently have in place.

I find the question of peer to be particularly salient. We put so much emphasis into peer review and we elevate it to such high importance because it adds substance and value to our work (supposedly). Still, who counts as a peer is a question I repeatedly asked myself both as I read the book and spoke with other fellows. What confounds me here is that peer is immediately reduced and relegated to academic community, but I have this personal belief that peer is a lot more that just published authors in a field or experienced researchers. My definition of this category would also include those people who participate in our research or those who’s backs we build our research upon or those who would benefit from our research. Some may refer to these folks as stakeholders, but I find that problematic only in the sense that I think everyone in some way has a stake in published research. Nevertheless, in thinking about Fitzpatrick’s notion of system-building, I am inclined to wonder how does the public factor into the ways in which we rethink scholarly publishing, especially with regard to access?

What sparks this question in relation to Fitzpatrick’s book is two columns that appeared last week in The Guardian. Mike Taylor, a paleontologist with the University of Bristol, published an article entitled “Hiding your research behind a paywall is immoral.” His stance is fairly simple, “If you are a scientist, your job is to bring new knowledge into the world. And if you bring new knowledge into the world, it’s immoral to hide it.” Now is he saying that scientists are purposefully hiding their research from the eyes of the great unwashed masses (READ: the public)? No. His issue strikes at the heart of dissemination and the idea that knowledge is best served when it is made widely available for others to use. The argument here lies primarily with scholars choosing to publish publicly funded work in journals that are not open access (OA). I find myself sympathetic to Taylor’s sentiments in that I think the value of academic research lies not necessarily within a scientific community but rather what people are able to do with it within and outside the confines of an academic community. I, however, do have a single gripe with Taylor’s argument and that is his inclination to refer to scholars who publish behind paywalls as “immoral.” If we return to Fitzpatrick’s focus on the ecology of publishing, I’m not sure that we should attack scientists for following the publishing standards of the current system. In fact, I believe that it is the system that we should focus upon not the individual.

So I was surprised when I saw last Wednesday that Chris Chambers, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University‘s school of psychology, rebut Taylor’s argument by referring to folks who publish behind paywalls as “victims” rather than miscreants. Much of my surprise came in that I thought Chambers would take up this argument of system/disciplinary change rather than individual. Yet, his focus seemed more in-line with defending publishing standards and in doing so he even manages to devalue OA publications (although I am not sure this is his intention). His argument is that there’s no “incentive” in publishing in an OA journal because there’s no prestige attached to those types of publications. Here  prestige is an important indicator of value–that the prestige of a journal “evolves based on history and trust” among its readership (e.g. scientists). He even goes on to state that we hurt junior scholars when we deny them the ability to publish in prestigious journals based purely on political commitments. For me, these statements do not simply call into question the value of OA publishing venues; they also embrace a value system that  challenge what constitutes as knowledge and how we should value certain types of knowledge. I find this bizarre.

In reading these articles in relation to Fitzpatrick as an attempt to determine where I stand, I have come to the position that you build value in a system. I am not a scientist, but I think that the argument between these two researchers easily extends to other disciplines as well. In my opinion, the goal of any disciplinary community is to generate knowledge that we perceive to have some form of public good. We do not research for the sake of research. Not to get too technical, but the word publish stems from the Latin publicare, which means “to make public.” How can we say that we are publishing if only a select group has access? In making this argument I am saying that value comes with the largest level of readership and engagement with ideas possible. The key for me is that value is not something that can be (nor should it) contained within an artifact. Value is a result of the activities that happen around that artifact. I think that we can easily build value around an OA journal if we agree that our notions of the trust that builds prestige stems from an assembly that encompasses different levels of participation across scale. This is a way of practicing that envelopes intra- and interdisciplinary conversations, researchers engaging with non-academic publics about their research, and non-academic publics engaging with each other about research and what it means for them. For example, a high school computer teacher might not write a note in response to Cynthia and Dickie Selfe’s “The Politics of the Interface” in College Composition and Communication. Yet, having access to this article might affect the way in which she teaches students to value the digital literacy that comes with computer interfaces not as tools of democracy and empowerment but as systems that tacitly promote dominant cultural values. In this scenario, the value of knowledge stems from reception and use in order to alter the way in which an individual understands and acts in the world. I would argue that this was the publication’s intent–an intent that cannot fully materialize behind a paywall.

My experiences at this year’s AIA annual meeting were different from those of previous ones.  In the past, I would usually attend presentations that were somehow related to topics that interested me as a burgeoning graduate student and, in part, I found myself caught in a whirlwind of names, faces, and seemingly missed connections.  This year, however, I decided to approach the AIA annual meeting in a different way: I would engage in the usual conference-y activities, while monitoring the conference happenings on the twitterverse.  Why was the twitterverse particularly relevant to me at the AIA?  I turned to Twitter for insight about which archaeologists/historians/philologists were using it – and, more importantly – how they were using it.  My mission was to track down as many tweeters (in person) and pick their brains about the digital toolkits they use in their research with the intent of expanding my own.

Days prior to the annual meeting, the Archaeological Institute of America put out an official announcement stating that the meeting’s hash tag would be #aia2013.  However, tweeters either used this in conjunction with, or replaced it with, #aiaapa.  In order to reach a potentially wider audience, I chose to use both hash tags in all of my conference-related tweets and I frequently looked over all tweets for each hash tag to ensure that I wasn’t missing out on stuff.  While attending presentations, I would summarize findings via Twitter and/or tweet the exact time and location of a particularly cool presentation.  In a way, I used Twitter to “put the word out there” so that others would be able to know more about what I was learning.

Then, one day, while reviewing the aforementioned hash tags during a session, I noticed a pattern: more than 3 conference participants were tweeting about something called #lawdi.  As an archaeologist that is trained to detect patterns, I quickly became desperate to learn more about this seemingly secretive layer of conference communication.  I clicked on the hash tag and was unable to detect much of anything; I scoured through many tweets and couldn’t piece anything together (although, in retrospect, I should’ve simply googled it).  A few moments later, the people that were using #lawdi tweeted their plans about seeing each other at a roundtable discussion later in the day.  Success!  I would attend this roundtable discussion and be surrounded by people that I had “uncovered” through my sleuthing efforts…

Later that day…

I attended a roundtable discussion entitled “Linked Open Data for the Ancient World.”  I attended this discussion because lots of people were tweeting about it (including those #lawdi folks) and also because I had very little working knowledge on the topic of linked open data and I wanted to learn about how academics in my general field of study have operationalized it.  Dr. Sebastian Heath (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World @ NYU) was the discussion’s moderator and was also one of the people that I had been trying to track down.  Once Dr. Heath began talking, my insecurities about not knowing too much about linked open data were quickly eased and all 20 of us participants were encouraged to ask questions and engage in discussion.  Someone asked, “What is linked open data?” and, based on the discussions that ensued, I learned the following:

Linked Open Data…

*…are a set of “pretty good” practices

*…are the linked relationships between things

*…as a way to bridge worlds together 

With the seeds of linked open data freshly planted in my mind, I set out to meet and interact with people that could teach me more about how these concepts can be merged with archaeology… As a CHI Fellow under the direct guidance of Dr. Ethan Watrall, I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to meet some of his colleagues, such as Dr. Eric Kansa (Alexandria Archive Institute).  The meeting that I had with Dr. Kansa was extremely insightful and, as a result, has influenced some of the ways that I am now approaching my CHI research.  For example, I began to learn the importance of archaeological data being made available and easily accessible to the larger archaeological community.  If I have access to data generated by ongoing archaeological projects in southeastern Europe, for example, I could use that information perhaps to better inform the data from my own dissertation project, making it easier to understand patterns and variation at the local and regional scales of analysis.  Moreover, after attending the session entitled “Managing Archaeological Data in the Digital Age: Best Practices and Realities,” I learned about the creative ways that archaeologists incorporate digital means into their research.  Dr. William Caraher (et al.), for example, spoke about some on-the-ground challenges faced by smaller archaeological projects that can perhaps be alleviated by plugging into a digital archaeological database.  I have since been thinking about the ways that I can make my data better accessible to other archaeologists…

Later that evening, over beer and a game of football, I met up with several people whose tweets I had been following throughout the conference.  At some point, I heard someone reference #lawdi during conversation and my attention was immediately caught.  However, I faced the night’s ultimate dilemma: do I admit that I know nothing about #lawdi and ask them what it is, or, do I just sit back and piece things together on my own?  I decided on the former.  I nervously asked everyone what #lawdi is.  My new friends were extremely informative and told me really great things about it.  #lawdi stands for the Linked Ancient World Data Institute, which is a resource that I am excited to learn more about.  In conclusion, my goal of uncovering the digital strata at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America had been realized, and, like regular dirt archaeology, I found some pretty awesome surprises, such as #lawdi.

Visualizing Adderall

Introduction: From vitamins to painkillers to psychotropic drugs, consuming pills has become a normalized and even expected part of life for many Americans. In 2010, US pharmaceutical sales topped $300 billion dollars and continue to be one of the most profitable industries in the nation[i]. This unprecedented incorporation of prescription drugs into daily life has been referred to by Anthropologists as “pharmaceuticalization” – a complex process that is reshaping the way we think about our health, our bodies, our relationships, and our own identities[ii]. For my CHI fellowship project, I intend to illustrate this process and the dynamic ways pharmaceuticals are understood and integrated into everyday American Culture.

For the purposes of this project, I have chosen to focus on a particular set of drugs which is the topic of my dissertation work: prescription stimulants used to treat the symptoms of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This includes brands like Adderall, Vyvanse, Concerta, Focalin, etc. which are commonly prescribed to adults who suffer from this condition. While these pharmaceuticals serve as effective medications for many patients, they have also assumed alternative identities as recreational drugs and most notably, as “study aids” for college students. Non-medical users claim that drugs like Adderall provide them the energy, motivation and focus needed to complete academic work. Despite the medical and legal risks involved with unsupervised use of these drugs, prevalence rates have been recorded as high as 35% and continue to grow[iii].

Although Adderall is an inanimate object, it does not exist in a vacuum. It operates in biomedical, social and academic worlds and as a result, takes on multiple meanings in American Culture. For my CHI project, I am interested in digitally representing these complex lives of ADHD medications through their multiple forms which I will cover in more detail below.

 Audience and Importance: Pharmaceuticalization, and in particular, the normalization of Adderall use among college students is a topic of significant interest among scholar, educators, scientists, healthcare professionals and the general public. Each stakeholder is interested in a different part of the drug behavior: prevalence rates, impacts on cognitive function, medical side effects, expectations of performance, etc. However in order to truly understand Adderall’s role in the modern society, it is important to consider all of these facets concurrently. Thus, one of the biggest obstacles to understanding the social life is Adderall is being able to capture its complexity through any one set of data.

Additionally, the ways in which Americans understand and exchange information about pharmaceuticals like Adderall are changing rapidly. In particular, students are relying on pharmaceutical advertising, internet forums, discussion boards, and social media as mediums to interpret and share their own pharmaceutical experiences. To address these issues, the proposed project will offer a diverse set of visual representations of Adderall use in digital form. This includes mapping prevalence rates of illicit drug behaviors, linguistically analyzing Adderall-centered tweets from college students, and even collecting/contextualizing artistic representations of this drug behavior. These various data visualizations will be presented on a localized website where users will be able to switch between various views of Adderall use and as a result, gain a more comprehensive understanding of the social life of this drug.

This project will also be of interest to digital anthropologists who are interested in data visualization and exploring new methods for presenting the “social life of things”[iv]. If successful, this project will serve as a proof of concept that can be expanded to visualize the social life of any drug, technology or cultural object.

 Technical Specifications: This project will be housed in a wordpress website hosted by MATRIX. It will include an introduction to the project and some basic information about Adderall. Although there are an infinite number of different data sets that could be represented on this site, I will choose two to use as proof of concept. In particular, I am interested in trying out some of the various tools provided on http://selection.datavisualization.ch/.

The first visualization will be a geospatial map of prevalence rates among college students – this information will be gathered from university health centers across the country and represented through mapbox. The second visualization will be a live twitter feed which demonstrates the frequency in which people are tweeting about ADHD medications. This will be modeled after the www.NoHomophobes.com  website and include actual tweets as well as overall linguistic statistics. There are several tools I can use to accomplish this including Microsoft’s FUSE Lab’s SocialGadgets or I can build my own platform with the help of MATRIX.

 Sustainability: As mentioned, this project is a proof of concept – it is the first of a series of data visualizations which I hope to create on the phenomena of pharmaceuticalization. Given that my dissertation research is on Adderall use, I am interested in expanding on this website as I encounter and produce new data sets. For example, it would be great to gather statistics about pharmaceutical sales and the prevalence of medical side effects. I would also be interesting to have the site become interactive so that viewers can contribute to a broader understanding of Adderall. This could be in the form of crowd sourcing narratives or having people submit original artwork.

Beyond Adderall, this project can be extended to look at any number of pharmaceuticals or medical technologies. I can easily see this framework being applied to anything from birth control pills to marijuana. As a result, I feel the proposed project has significant potential in helping Americans comprehensively view the social lives of medical objects and access multiple forms of data in one centralized location.

The project will have two main components; the first part will be a map interface that will be built in Mapbox. This will be an interactive map of Zambia that will be the front page of the site and will provide introductory information to the project. It will also show ten towns that are connected by the main rail line in Zambia that have a long history of football. The towns will include: Chililabombwe, Chingola, Mufulira, Luanshya, Kitwe, Ndola, Kabwe, Lusaka, Mazabuka and Livingstone. The second part will be the detail page that will have the site structure, design, content and commenting or contributions features that will be built in WordPress. When one clicks on one of the towns in the map interface, the site will jump to the town’s detail page that will have a football history narrative of the town. Images, archival evidence and other sources such as oral histories will also be provided to support the narrative. The detail pages will also provide space where users will be able to make comments and suggestions to the narrative and other sources uploaded to the site.

Generally, football communities are always in need of well-documented information and evidence of the existence great football clubs and players in their communities. While this will be a scholarly project, it will not be limited to scholars only because Zambian men and women of different ages and educational levels are very interested in the game and have varying experiences and insights that they can contribute. The project will be open to make sure that all who are able to read, comment and participate in anyway are given an opportunity to do so. The goal is to bring out the role football has been playing in people’s lives in each town starting from the historical development of football clubs, individual players, supporters and football communities at large.

As primary sources on the history of football in Zambia are not easy to find, the interactive nature of the project will provide an opportunity for people interested in the game to participate and collaboratively play a role in the reconstruction of the history of football in each of the Zambian towns. The current enthusiasm in the game provides fertile ground for a public scholarly project that can give people an opportunity to participate in the reconstruction of the history of football in their communities.

In the beginning, I indicated that one of my primary interest in research is investigating and understanding the dynamics of space as it is shared by individuals and groups who are connected and disconnected in a variety of ways. Specifically, I’m interested in they ways a digital intervention might organize and display various understandings of space as they compete with each other. At the current moment, the one area of inquiry that has my attention is activism within the Lansing and East Lansing communities. Whether it is organized labor fighting to resist “right-to-work” legislation or Students for a Democratic Society protesting the Vietnam War, the capital area has had a rich history of left-of-center activist movements.

Still, questions arise for me. How do we understand the rich history of activist movements in the capital area as they might relate to each other across time within the same spaces? In other words, how is it that activism as it is practiced in the present is connected to or divergent from the practices of other groups and individuals in the past? Furthermore, how has the meaning of certain cultural spaces (e.g. capital steps, the Hannah Administration Building, or the “Eastside” of Lansing) changed either across time or in the present as they are shared by a variety of people?

For this project, I decided to explore this idea by developing a digital project that would seek to answer these types of questions. In fact, the project should be considered more of a proof of concept that will serve as a pilot of a much larger piece in the future. I have decided to work with members of a community organization to build a digital repository that would house various materials developed by the organization throughout its history and explore members’ divergent understandings of activism as they scale from a single shared space to other spaces within the capital area, specifically the “Eastside.” The organization that I am working with is the NorthStar Center, which was a radical community space and events venue committed to social justice and building a culture of resistance. NorthStar closed its doors almost a year ago, but they have various organizing tools (e.g. pamphlets, newsletters, flyers, zines, etc.) that are sitting in boxes gathering dust. They have expressed that they would like to make these items available to a larger audience and create a living legacy of what the organization was in relation to the community.

Technical Specification

At the moment, I am considering two platforms to build this repository. On the front-end I plan to build a website using WordPress. On the back-end I plan on setting up a repository using KORA from which material on the website will be pulled from. The website itself will contain documents and other artifacts currently in NorthStar’s collection. While each of the objects within the database will be accompanied by narrative texts on the website, I also plan on conducting/recording video interviews with collective members and affiliates that would help offer more context to the many artifacts in the repository.

Sustainability & Future Focus

The question of sustainability with this project is an important one. As I indicated above, I see the NorthStar project as being a small part of what can potentially be a larger project that documents and maps activist activity within the area across time. Therefore, it would be advantageous to work with an organization like the Allen neighborhood center after NorthStar, because these two have share the same space over the past decade and understand the space and activism in divergent ways. It is important to note that as other organizations are added to the project, the purpose here is not to create a sense of antimosity or devalue one way of performing activism in space from another. Instead, the project is gear toward being inclusive by demonstrating directly and indirectly how divergent activist practices and spaces are linking to each other in both realized and tacit ways. At some point, I imagine a geo-spatial component that is attached to the repository. This would be another way of documenting activist activities across time and space rendering a different way of visualizing the artifacts the repository.

The project that is emerging as a result of my CHI Fellowship is one related to my dissertation research in northern Albania.  The tumuli (burial mounds) of northern Albania appeared suddenly on the Shkodër plain around the start of the Bronze Age (ca. 3000 BC).  As a result of the ongoing Projekti Arkeologjikë i Shkodrës (PASH), which is co-directed by Drs. Michael Galaty (Millsaps College) and Lorenc Bejko (University of Tirana), we have been able to locate, identify, and map most tumuli throughout the region.  However, time is of the essence, particularly since tumuli are mined for soil and are being damaged and destroyed at a very high rate.  My project, Tumulus, in its immediate form, will serve as a digital repository through which information collected for each tumulus will be made available to a wider audience.

Significance

Like the plethora of “culture types” commonly used to describe the prehistoric peoples of the Balkans, there are comparatively similar numbers of on-going archaeological projects throughout the region at any given time.  Moreover, the results generated from archaeological projects are often published in obscure journals and in languages that are generally inaccessible by the global archaeological community.  Although my CHI project will focus on northern Albanian tumuli as a case study, it is hoped that this project will serve as an example and perhaps repository for other similar Balkan initiatives that seek to archive, store, remember, display, and keep track of the rich data sets collected by archaeologists in the wider region.  To this end, in the future I can solicit tumulus map data from other archaeologists working in other Balkan countries, which can be added to Tumulus.

These northern Albanian tumuli, when considered within the larger spatial scale of the Balkans, have the potential to help archaeologists better understand the impacts that social interaction and population movement had on their sudden appearance during the Bronze Age.  Did the concept of tumulus burial spread as a result of migration, indigenous adoption, or both?  Until data generated from other similar contexts are made available, this is something that will be difficult to assess.  As mentioned above, my project will feed into a larger initiative that will compile data relating to tumuli throughout the Balkans, thereby filling in the wider spatial and temporal gaps that continue to plague the region.

Audience

My project will target several audiences: 1) the inhabitants of Shkodër; 2) archaeologists and Albanians alike interested in the archaeology of Albania; 3) and those interested in cultural heritage management and the preservation of these prehistoric features.  As a survey team leader, I speak with almost every single landowner, farmer, and villager that I see.  I tell them exactly who we are, where we are from, what we are doing, and, most importantly, why we are doing it.  Since my work in Shkodër began in 2010, my goal has been to meet everyone in the community and to share with them our project goals.  As a result, we are now known throughout the region and people have generally taken a liking towards us.  My project will provide local inhabitants the opportunity to view the data that PASH has collected thus far, allowing for further conversations in future fieldseasons.

Since the PASH project is still accruing survey and excavation data, scholarly publications have not yet occurred.  In the meantime, however, these data are perhaps best served in a public sphere – rather than simply living in FileMaker most of the year.  If the survey data from the Shkodër tumuli are made available via my proposed project, then scholars working on similar projects and/or working in the region will be better able to compare their data with ours.  Moreover, by creating a public space for the cultural heritage aspect of the PASH project, Albanians, cultural heritage scholars, and archaeologists can refer to these rapidly deteriorating tumuli as an example of – and case study for – the importance of preserving the past.

Technical Tools

The tools with which I will build my project include MapBox (http://mapbox.com/) and TileMill (http://mapbox.com/tilemill/).  Through these programs, I will create an interactive, clickable, linkable, and informative map that will be fed into a digital repository and will be housed on the Michigan State University’s Matrix server.  This project will store and display data in such a way that they will be searchable and retrievable by other people.  Ultimately, I would like the data to have an xml or rdf representation so that it can be amenable to revisualizations of my project.  Because my data will be linkable and searchable, different kinds of data will be fed into different kinds of databases.  For example, data from classical period artifacts found within the PASH survey study region will be linked into Pleiades (http://pleiades.stoa.org/home).  By feeding data into Pleiades, for example, other scholars interested in the region, time period, and/or similar kinds of material culture will be able to learn about the kinds of things being documented in northern Albania.   Lastly, I will incorporate an informational pamphlet – which was created by PASH students with support from the Albanian government and recently distributed to farmers – into my project.

Sustainability

Since there are at least two PASH fieldseasons remaining, more data will be collected.  The project that I build will need to be done on a platform that allows for change and the addition of more data.  In addition, new data will be added to the existing MapBox and TileMill project that I will build.  My proposed project, as of now, will be managed and maintained by me, yet viewable and searchable by all.

Future Directions

Although my project is focused on a relatively small spatial and temporal area of interest, it can ultimately be a part of a larger pan-Balkan and/or pan-Adriatic initiative that seeks to document, store, and display standardized data that comes from other archaeological projects throughout the region.  By contributing to this larger goal, I and other archaeologists can have access to and begin to compare different kinds of datasets that are typically collected and stored (then forgotten) in FileMaker.  By comparing and contrasting different datasets generated from other projects in the Balkan region, it is hoped that the dizzying number and array of Balkan “culture types” can begin to make sense when understood through real-time on-the-ground data that are easily accessible by all.

Most importantly, the local inhabitants of the Shkodër region have the right to access PASH-generated information and data.  If we are going to help reduce and mitigate the destruction of local tumuli, then we need to invest in increased public awareness, both at the local and regional scale.   I am also aware that projects such as mine might attract looters, but I believe public education of landowners is the best remedy for this problem.