Category: Extra Credit

I attended Laura Crossley’s presentation on October 29^th, 2019. In her talk she discussed many things, all those things revolving around Digital Huminites. She her main goal was so discuss Text Mining Digital Humanities Blogs with APIs, Open Refine, and R. During her talk she used a lot of big words and terms that I didn’t really understand, but I did take away a few things from the talk that I thought was interesting. 

One of the things I picked up on was how she was saying that nowadays blogposts on word press are belittling. She said it is getting harder for her and the program she uses called DH Now. This program takes blogs written on WordPress that were nominated to be on the homepage after being peer reviewed. These blogs consist of many different topics in Digital History. In her talk Crossley talks about how although she runs this website it was supposed to shut down this summer and now, she’s not sure what its future looks like. She then says that there aren’t enough blog posts being posted to WordPress in order for the site to keep promoting them. She later brought up that it seems to have been taking over by twitter. 

This connection had me thinking, as technology advances is it possible that what is happening to DH Now is the same type of effect that happened to Theater in the 1936-era? Around 1939 theater was takin over by radio and movies, so it was hard to preserve the plays and such forth making the actors, directors, etc. lose their jobs. ¹ Crossley was talking of a way to preserve DH Now instead of completely shutting down the website. What if instead of shutting down the website she “evolves” with the times? Maybe by finding a way to implement twitter into the equation, which I know she said that would be complicated. If not implementing twitter then possibly find a way to implement younger generations onto WordPress/Blog posts. 

The way the FTP made people want to go to the theater was by making them cheaper, putting in a lot of time/energy into making them, employing people since jobs were scarce, by making people happy and distracting them from their current situation, and by spreading out to different states. It could be possible DH Now just needs a revamp like the theaters did to keep them going and preserve them. ²

Either way, I really enjoyed Crossley’s talk. It really put a new perspective on Digital Humanities, and how things are lost in each technological advancement. Everyone is so focused on the next phone, the next laptop, the next of the next, and so on. It really made me take a step back from our everyday experience of the “next and newest thing”. It made me think about things of the past and how the next thing effects the past. 

Laura Crossley’s presentation was informative and engaging. It did a good job of outline the ups and down of the digital research space. Her research question was about the representative nature of blogging and whether or not it was still an appropriate way to disseminate information about the digital humanity space as peer reviewed journals and about these subjects become more readily available.

She introduced discourse about the permanence of the scholarship that is done on line, and I found this to be a particularly relevant critique of digital media particularly in this new information age. DH Now is run on a stable platform that is actively managed, but for websites that not well preserved and articles that are older issues of dead links are always top of mind. There is not singular united way to preserve digital scholarship appropriately in the case of a blog or website being abandoned. Part of the appeal of blogging as a complement to traditional scholarship is the free flow of information. In this presentation in particular Crossley mentioned that she was only analyzing links that were not restricted behind paywalls. The internet itself “has more archival information than scholars have ever had access to” ³This of course highlights the ways in which the internet has democratized the spread and use of information for people who cannot afford to be pay for access to journals.

Lastly, in her text modeling she spoke at length about the ways that topics modeling helped her to see certain trends in word usage while also highlighting the distribution and coherence in word use over time as well the extremely common and closely related vocabulary. It seems that although there are certainly subsections within the digital humanities space, the overall conversations that are happening are rather narrow and untied. I wonder how much of that has to do with the newness of the field and how much of that has to do with the people who are engaging in the scholarship.

The Datathon Talk was an idea of Diana Greenwald for the National Gallery of Art (NGA). Which purpose does it serve? The NGA has for mission collecting Art. Nevertheless, compared to other museums, the NGA has a pretty young collection, started in 1941. Of course, the collection has grown, notably thanks to gifts from donors. According to Greenwald, all of the aforementioned lead to new possibilities and especially the use of data science in order to understand the NGA collection. Data scientists and historians can gather around three central criteria: analyze, centralize, and visualize.

When Greenwald looked at the NGA collection, she wondered “Does this export to a spreadsheet?”. The answer is yes. In Art history, there are simple bias. For example, the idea that “tall means healthy” was a belief in the old times but it is not representative. There can also be a disproportionate attention to some artists or medias. The Datathon teams decided to combine collection data with methods analysis. As a matter of fact, questions emerged mainly around diversity and inclusiveness.

The teams participating to the Datathon Talk were formed by professors, historians, data scientists, but also graduate and undergraduate students. Each team had a subject assigned.

Team 1 talked about “Diversity on display: who is on the wall at the NGA?”. It shows that most objects in the collection are from male and white artists. In addition, depends on the building (east or west), the objects are from different group of people, ethnicity, and gender. The representation of women becomes concentrated in some rooms of the museums as well. The team also noticed that when doing data research, they encountered difficulties with transparency, accuracy, and availability. For example, the painting “Girl on Globe 2”, is not linked to any location, the data is not available. Data mining can be challenging.

Team 2 talked about “Influence of women as donor in the Collection”. Surprisingly, there were many women, some of them famous, who influenced the collection. For example, Julia J. Noorell, a collector in the South, Kathan Brown, and Ailsa Mellon Bruce who donated 182 paintings. When the NGA received consequent donations, it reshaped the NGA’s perspective, sense, and aesthetic.

Team 3 talked about “Acquisition History”. The team noticed that volume of art created by men stabilized over the years, but women’s work is increasing. They also observed that American art is in expansion since the 1980s. They studied the proportion of works by gender and by media type in the entire collection. For example, most female representations are in photography and prints. The different NGA directors, for a total of five, also influenced the direction of the collection.

Team 4 talked about “Display versus Holdings”. Indeed, they ask the question “what should go on the NGA’s walls?”.  The biggest criteria for decision making is the artist popularity. This is something we can observe on Wikipedia pages for example and see how many times they were visited. For example, Van Gogh, Da Vinci, and Neil Armstrong. It is particularly interesting to notice that 97% of the page view correspond to 20% of the artist. There is a huge concentration of interest on a few famous artists.

Team 5 focused their research on a software called “Inception V3 Neural Network”. The idea is to see abstract art to be representative of life. They gathered thousands of pictures together in a visual goal. The result is surprising, and many interpretations are possible.

Team 6 analyzed spatial evidence. There are different scales of space. For example, widener Artworks Exhibition locations over time, relationships, building level, room level.

What should be the conclusion of this Datathon Talk? According to Greenwald, we should remember that the NGA evolves depends on taste and institutional priorities. Data research brought up questions related to curatorial work. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Is it worth collecting? Curatorial work is socially bounded and changes overtime. Data research should be playing a main role in understanding and reshaping the NGA or even other collections of museums. Data research can bring a new dimension to the curatorial work through the use of diverse and useful data tools.

In today’s society, popular culture seems to glorify acting “wild” during youth, and even throughout adulthood. Songs and movies both seem to encourage people of all ages to party and behave almost chaotically as the popular song, “Wake up in the Sky” by Gucci Mane, Bruno Mars, and Kodak Black; or even in the hit movie, The Hangover, directed by Todd Phillips. This over-glorification of partying seems like pure immaturity to some people, namely older generations. However, perhaps this culture was created in order to distract the public from what was really going on in America. Isn’t that one of the reasons that American culture began to skyrocket after the Great Depression?

Popular culture seems to serve as a distraction to the public in the way that Americans can dream about partying on the weekends or running away from their life and starting new somewhere else. But due to the fact that many Americans have to work gruelling hours just to pay off loans for their houses or college debt, popular culture can only be a dream for them. This plays into the fact that mainly the upper class gets the luxury to party extravagantly. It’s so integrated into popular culture that although movies may not even be about “partying,” they still incorporate some aspect of partying into the movie so that it’s appealing to viewers. A perfect example of this would be The Interview. This movie, although it serves as a comedy, serves as a message about blindly following the government and once the people see how foolish their leader is, they can start to understand how badly that leader has been running the country. Yet the movie still contains at least two major scenes of partying montages.

And this brings me to my final point, although music can be used to distract the public from their daily lives, it’s still also used to explain the grievances the public has towards the injustice of inequality, such as the Grammy winning “This is America.” Inequality has been present in America since the Europeans came and slaughtered the actual indigenous people of this land. However, inequality seems to have taken a rise due to the fact that now America has Donald Trump for a President. He divides the country and is blatantly racist, amongst sexist and countless other things, and ineffective. The only thing he’s doing is creating a split in the country and he empowers the racists to become even more racist, which literally resulted in the rise of the KKK and the Nazis. Some artists, however, are trying to use their platform in order to combat the racism that Trump has made prevalent in today’s America such as Eminem’s Diss Track.

Overall, popular culture can serve as a distraction from the injustices of society today. After the Great Depression, President Roosevelt tried to unite the country and popular culture helped do this. Roosevelt tried to unite Americans by pitting them against the enemy during the war, the Nazis. Somehow, thanks to our discriminatory President, the Nazis are back and in this country. The amount of songs and movies that address what’s wrong with society has risen due to the fact that the government, and society as a whole, is seemingly going backwards and perhaps if these artists and movies keep addressing the injustice, people will finally begin to see that something is wrong.

Works Cited:

“George Mason University Central Authentication Service (CAS).” Central Authentication Service (CAS) – CAS – Central Authentication Service. Accessed October 9, 2019. https://www-nytimes-com.mutex.gmu.edu/2013/04/07/books/review/fear-itself-by-ira-katznelson.html.

I believe that in today’s culture, especially in America, we aren’t looking to a lot of media with “lighter fare”. With the exception of Tik Tok, a lot of issues that are coming to their apex have to do with life and death (ex. Climate change, female reproductive rights, trans rights, immigration safety, war, the incarceration system, the ongoing feminist movement, etc) so it is harder for people to try to ignore those issues. We know that we love to laugh but, our news and our adults have emphasized that we cannot stand idly by and try to escape what is happening in front of us. To be fair, the 1930s attempts to get out of the Great Depression were a lot more challenging than today’s time, economically. Yes, as Dickstein mentions, the arts are what can relieve an exhausted nation

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but, even arts today are reflecting not an escape but a satire or, even direct relation to the issues that we face today. 

For example, a new show that has gained ground recently is The Politician

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. It garners attention because of its star cast but truly represents the government today through a high school class president’s struggle to win the election. It isn’t a story that is meant to leave behind the issues of our upcoming election. It takes those concepts, emboldens them, and shows us an eerie look into the future of how the election could turn out. Another example is Broadway’s smash hit, Hamilton

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. On a global scale, Hamilton appealed to all audiences. It was not a happy ending yet, it called to what America was truly lacking: diversity and understanding. It didn’t try to distract the public from what was “really going on” rather, it emphasized the issues that America was facing outside of the theater. As of late, our media reflects the issues we want to discuss because we know now, better than ever, that hiding from them cannot get us any better at understanding them.

“What a hard week! Let’s go to the mall this week-end, eat at the food court and get some goodies!”. This is what you can hear nowadays when the economics atmosphere is down. On the other hand, we heard measures like the one of President Obama who “preserved a $50-million increase in arts funding” back in 2009 when the country was sinking in the crisis. We can wonder, where should we stand regarding those two calls?

Let’s take a look back in the 1930s. When the Great Depression sunk the economy and peoples moral. Roosevelt and the New Deal lightened the path for most people in difficulties.

The projects created in Music, for example, through the Folk movement, in writing and much more in the Art field thanks to newly created agencies like the FWP (Federal Writer’ Project) or the FTP (Federal Theatre Project).

What art would bring to the nation is not “escapism, as we sometimes imagine, but speed, energy and movement at a time of economic stagnation and social malaise.” ⁹

Is it still true today? Is Morris Dickstein right about his comparison between the 1930s and the 2008 recession? Maybe not. We have heard in the news about some people bringing about the idea that we need another “New Deal”. The real question is, do people need a New Deal package to feel better?

If you recall the idea in the 1930s that there was a contrast between a “feudal system” trying to survive against the emerging Long Civil Rights era ¹⁰. Nowadays, developed countries have already won this fight. Many rights that people fought for were adopted, from the right to vote for women, same rights for all citizens, opening borders for immigration, rights for immigrants, and more recently gay marriage.

There are two main ideas that appeared through the last decades. Firstly, since the creation and progress of the new technologies of information and communication, Art has never been as developed and present than ever. Art is now accessible and democratized. People can express themselves on social networks too.

Secondly, people nowadays find comfort in the consumer society. Buying consumer goods, watching the television and its ads, spending the money in junk food are the new ways of “feeling good”.

Everybody has in mind one of the most famous advertisement by the McDonald’s Company “I’m Lovin It” where the concept is that you can buy inexpensive (junk) food to make you feel good any time you need quickly and easily.

Among the most famous singers in the world, some of them managed to gather many people together and make them feel happy, special and important.

The first that comes in mind is Michael Jackson or the “King of Pop”. He managed to make people feel better. The day he left us, the world mourned his death. He was a symbol to the eyes of millions of people in the United States, but also internationally. He was regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest entertainers.

Whitney Houston, another African-American artist, singer and actress, marked her time in R&B, pop, soul and gospel.

Nevertheless, music became a huge industry. For example, there is a website dedicated to Michael Jackson with an online store selling goodies and tickets for new events even after his death.

While people want to feel better in times of recession like in 2008, they are being sold a fake comfort through the society of capitalism who itself brought the economy down. It is paradoxical.  

Maybe people do not need another New Deal, but they should remember what it was to fight for rights, what is the essence of Art and how to appreciate simple things of life, like the Folk groups on the railroads bringing instants of joy to the people.