My idea for my final project shifted throughout the course, as my perception of DH shifted. 

Coming into the course, I felt that to qualify a project or research as “digital” humanities, its practice had to go beyond traditional methods of survey and analysis, to take full advantage of the digital tools of inquiry available to scholars. I initially wanted to go down a path of “traditional” DH – using digital tools to analyze a body of text in ways that would be painstaking for humans, but lacking a clear direction or research question, I felt that the project was uninspired and lacking clarity. 

As we grappled with concepts like minimal computing, and definitions of digital humanities that relied less on machine labor and more on digital literacy, accessibility, and bypassing traditional structural hurdles in research and dissemination, I found inspiration in one of my biggest time wasters: the internet forum. I could combine my original idea of compiling a corpus of Jewish language with a social studies perspective, addressing gaps in the literature pertaining to the experiences of contemporary Orthodox Jews. I found our readings on social media as data fascinating and was excited by the prospect of how this could be applied to investigate unique cultures and subcultures online. 

The research goals of my project are to scrape data from forums that cater to an Orthodox audience, one male oriented and one female oriented, and examine if there are notable differences in the language patterns used on either forum. There is a cultural expectation that men utilize more foreign loan words in their English use, while women are more inclined to use formal English. My project aims to identify if there is an actual, measurable distinction between the English used by users on the female and male dominated sites. 

Our praxis experiences in the class prepared me for potential obstacles in the process. The majority of DH work is being done by and for an English-speaking audience, and therefore many existing programs and tools operate within that framework, especially pertaining to language and dialects. I anticipate that much, if not most, of the time in the researching stage will be spent refining the corpus: “cleaning” the data (and the software) to be able to identify common terms despite variations in spelling or foreign origin. Ultimately, I envision this project to culminate in a traditional “paper” (although it may be distributed digitally) in lieu of a site or interactive tool. This decision is in part aligned with minimal computing as a practice: while the content of the research is digital, the final output doesn’t have to be, and also in that I don’t see an interactive or digital element adding to the understanding or synthesis of the content. 

I am not sure if this project will be seen to completion as I am not attending the second part of the class next semester, but the process of developing this project has been helpful in opening my mind to different forms of data and how social interactions in the digital world can authentically reflect trends, social norms, and shifts over time. I expect that this project and what I’ve learned about DH will inform my work throughout my studies at the graduate center, as I consider how to most effectively communicate research and findings to an evolving audience.

I hope it’s not too late! I just realized I had completely forgotten to submit this post.

This was my first time building a dataset. I chose to build a dataset for my final project because I was eager to learn to use Python in my research and because many of the questions I’m interested in require creating my own data, considering that I couldn’t find much existing data on the topic. Building this dataset felt like a foundation for work I hope to continue and expand in the future. 

My process was very iterative, and I had different expectations in the beginning phases. However, as I gained a clearer understanding of what type of data I wanted to collect and why, I reframed my approach. Initially, I planned to pull data from the Steam API, but I quickly realized I wasn’t finding the kind of information I was looking for. While Steam API provides useful metadata, such as genres, tags, and access to public user profiles, it does not provide more descriptive or thematic data needed to help identify feminist themes in horror games. I wanted data that would help me categorize and point me to game descriptions that could point to broader themes such as gender, embodiment, trauma, or power/structural dynamics.

I found that the Wikipedia horror subcategory tree, which I had been referencing a lot already, had better information on the games, so why not scrape those instead? The game pages provided more in-depth descriptions, which allowed me to extract keywords and then conduct a manual review to determine whether those keywords meaningfully and/or relevantly contributed to a broader feminist theme.

After narrowing down over 2,000 pages by creating a classifier to identify games with female protagonists, I was left with about 400 wiki pages to review. This wasn’t too bad, since many of the pulled pages were for individual characters and not the game itself, so I was able to narrow down the .csv file further by eliminating those wiki pages. Curating the dataset to include games with more developed Wikipedia pages and identifiable female protagonists helped me keep the project in scope. While curating a list of games, I noticed different themes emerging, and I started thinking about the keywords I wanted to add to my classifier when I do my web scrape to identify them across every page. Defining my keywords for the classifier was a bit confusing, and I think I might spend more time on this process in the future.

Once I built a classifier and web-scraped keywords that might point to feminist themes, manual review was a bit tedious. This is where I got to see Joanna Drucker’s concepts in action.  Not only was I reviewing the keywords scraped by my Python classifier, but I was also reading each page to identify themes that automated methods might have missed, as well as relevant keywords that the classifier had missed. This process required me to make interpretive decisions about how each game should be classified, underlining both the subjectivity involved in thematic categorization and the limitations of automated text analysis. I must say, during this process, I was a little intimidated to make my own interpretative choices and kept thinking about how to reevaluate my process to improve efficiency. 

This project has given me valuable experience in conducting research using Python, particularly with tools such as pandas and BeautifulSoup. Even though the goal of this project was not to interpret the data, the dataset I was building was already revealing interesting patterns and opportunities for future analysis. Overall, this experience has given me a stronger foundation for my future research methods and a clearer sense of how I might expand this dataset into a more refined, interpretive dataset moving forward.

I came into this class quite intimidated and confused by datasets, and ended up making my own in the end. I felt much more connected to the ideas and principles of Digital Humanities, and I am very eager to build upon this experience as I continue my DH graduate studies! 🙂

I developed a story map (on StoryMapJS) that does not follow a single path. Actually, it does not begin to follow a definitive path until 1899, when George W. Suriley enlisted into the U.S Army, traveling to Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and Japan before arriving in the Philippines in November 1900. Most of the slides throughout the story map contain Suriley’s entries, which was a purposeful decision.

Following Jojo Karlin’s advice following my presentation, I started off by transcribing written journal entries and letters that I discovered when completing my undergraduate thesis last year. The names of the respective writers includes George W. Suriley of course, as well as Louis E. Mahaffey, Apolinario Mabini, and War Department records documenting the hunt for Moro Chieftan Datu Ali. I ran into two distinct problems already knowing that my intentions for the story map is to produce a “personalized” historical experience. My definition for a “personalized” experience is giving users material that would have most likely been interacted with or seen by a civilian or American soldier. That does not entail War Department records, presenting the first distinct issue. Most information regarding real-time combat operations are classified, especially before modern-day telecommunication technology, thus, many American and Filipino civilians were not reading those particular sources. The second distinct issue is quantity. The most amount of written slides are, as stated earlier, from George W. Suriley. Thus, I struggled with figuring out whether or not it was fair, in terms of historical representation since I had sources that directly originated from Mabini, and those regarding Datu Ali. Regardless of these problems, I did not allow myself to significantly reduce, the material that I had shared in the story map.

My intentions with producing a story map titled “The Emergence of an American Empire: A “Personalized” Experience” is to give audiences a somewhat “personal” glimpse into the historical details and occurrences that emerged during the Philippine-American Wars. Reflecting on what I had learned in class – moreover on the topic of digital pedagogy – influenced me to redefine this objective. On one hand, there are newspapers showcasing occurrences surrounding the Spanish-American War. Beginning in 1899 however, it shifts towards the experiences of a few individuals (as well as hundreds more that the aforementioned figures interacted with or ran into during the conflict). This presented an opportunity for how the introduction slide, and first slide, would be set up. Instead of using the introductory page to present basic information about the sources, I turned them into instructions. Users are notified that they are about to begin a “non-linear” timeline. In addition, it is strongly suggested that they must spend some time reading into and learning about the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. If someone is not familiar with the history regarding these conflicts, basic relevant information is shared on the first slide (containing relevant Wikipedia articles, academic texts, and other online resources listed on the first slide). Simultaneously, I also emphasized that it is not an requirement to review secondary sources first because learning solely from primary historical sources is possible nonetheless. Overall, how the user chooses to interact with the story map is up to them. Either way, the story map is meant to provide a learning experience that permits users to follow the sequence of historical events as told through the lens of journalists and people who witnessed scenes of war.

From a Digital Humanities lens, paired with that of an Historian, such projects stand as sufficient resources for learning historical details about certain events. I definitely find inspiration from the online projects that were shared in the presentation, along with some past New York Times pieces that with eye-catching, information-sharing graphics. Regardless of the challenges described above, StoryMapJS allowed me produce another online resource that shares details relevant to the Spanish and Philippine-American Wars. Moreover, it is presented in a platform that is not as difficult to navigate compared to many complex, online archival bases such as the Library of Congress. The user simply has to click arrows, and the sources are cited throughout.

I was drawn to digital humanities after years of technology and culture writing turned into more art-oriented, and downright esoteric, study of how we know. I was excitedly struggling with questions of representation, language, art, knowledge production, and all the ways, times, and moments in which we decide we know something, anything. Specifically, I was concerned with how technology fit into this economy of knowing. As node of multidisciplinary study, I suspected digital humanities might have a finger in all the pots I was hoping to dip into: A combination of scholarly rigor, a self-reflexive look at the business and politics of academia and how it affects scholarship, and a humanistic perspective. I learned a lot this semester. Sometimes I felt like I learned a bit too much, and had enrolled in a program without sufficient overlap in my interests. But by the time I was working on this paper, I was experiencing the inverse: I feared I had not soaked up enough digital humanities to offer a paper that expressed how excited I felt to continue working towards this degree.

I was heavily inspired by Open Datasets for Media Studies and its call to center the dataset as an object of criticism. Turning it into an object of criticism made it possible to study the dataset not just as a tool, which is ODMS’s primary concern, but as an artefact of scholarly work, of knowledge production, of whoever made it or used it and their questions about the world and how they feel they can get to know it better. By turning something into an object of criticism, a writer can play with the boundaries that separate her from that object, which is why my proposed critical intervention is rooted in art criticism and opens up a path to connect it to art writing.

By fusing my take on dataset criticism and art criticism, I also charted a means for digital humanities scholars to be more proactive in cultural criticism. This works on multiple levels: Datasets are everywhere, people on Reddit were making datasets of the Epstein files and the proliferation of customer-facing LLM’s incentivizes more people to seek out or curate their own datasets. My paper pays considerable attention to how the curation and development of datasets is becoming more prominent in internet culture and DH’s decades of working within and against the dataset as a tool and artefact should lend them sufficient incentive to intervene in the cultural discourse around the role of data and data management through datasets. Additionally, research-based art, which often involves working with or literally producing datasets, is reaching new levels of prominence and exposure. And art critics seem varyingly equipped to evaluate the knowledge claims made by these works.
I hope this paper offers a solid foundation and outline for what data criticism can be. I want to create a Dataset Review as my capstone project, and have all kinds of writers – especially digital humanists – respond to the possibilities outlined in this paper to produce writing about datasets fosters community and discourse. That’s dataset criticism.

My project proposal, a Digital Interactive Concordance of Female Epics, was born of a certain dilettante attitude, wherein I touristically dabble in whatever catches my interest and manages to sustain it long enough for me to produce something. This is what often sends me bouncing from hobby to hobby or hyperfocus to hyperfocus, depending on the subject matter. Which is also to say I nominally have a lot of hobbies and interests clamoring for my limited attention, many resulting in project output in various states of completion. Works in progress. Most recently, these include knitting or crochet projects, linocut projects, numerous writings and drawings, and some code repositories.

One of my unfinished writing projects is a hand-curated concordance of the superficial occurrences of the specific thematic word forms that occurred in epic literature. I began that in 2017 when I decided that, as a reaction to current events, I would spend that year reading a list of sacred and epic works, including Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Shahnameh, and others. Over the course of the year, I completed the word form extraction for “vengeance”, having done so by hand even though I could have used some automated tools.

I left that project unfinished, but thought about it again in the early part of this Intro to DH class. I was amused to note that concordancing was one of the foundational events for Digital Humanities, and I initially thought, given this confluence, that I might pick up my original project as I had left it. But I didn’t start a new program just to walk in my own footsteps, so I thought to shift the focus from epics generally to epics authored by or attributed to women, such as Telemachus by Anna Seward, Psyche by Mary Tighe, and Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This, of course, both vastly constrained the territory and raised new questions entirely. At once you can see the difference in treatment; whereas the previously mentioned epics needed nothing but their titles (noting of course that two are anonymous), these three examples of female epics are less immediately familiar. Perhaps the *why* of it all lies more in this simple fact than anything else.

Additionally, this project isn’t merely a shift from one set of materials to another: it is also a chance to think about how, besides a static document, I might want to present the output, and what kind of interactivity that might involve. I conceived of it as a website that would provide thematic orientation to female epics, both to showcase how female epics fit within the larger epic tradition, but also in some sense to help readers explore the potential linguistic differences that may or may not be evident. Fundamentally the research questions raised by the project remain exploratory. I had the sense that doing might precede asking, and that the process of centering these materials might uncover questions along the way.

Should I and a group proceed with this project, I would be interested to see what new questions and concerns arise. But because I maintain a solid interest in epic literature, I can see myself continuing even without a team.

During this course I was excited to learn about different modalities used by digital humanities practitioners from various academic fields. Historians, literature and data studies scholars, etc., using mapping tools, data visualization, text analysis, and digital publishing to further the concerns of their field. So exciting!

Still, I struggled to see how my own critical concerns fit into these methodologies. I studied Sociology as an undergraduate student, but primarily read critical theory and queer theory. I did not conduct research, but rather, spent lots of time with very few aesthetic objects and with genealogies of thinkers who were also, in my mind, poets. My interests have always tended towards the granular, personal, and literary, even as I’ve come to work with and study technology. I continued to wonder how I could map these interests while maintaining the investment in the written form at the center of my desire to produce academic scholarship.

Encountering Marisa Parham’s scholarship was eye opening for me. I came to understand a path within digital humanities that used technology as a poetic device rather than solely a platform for expanding one’s audience, or optimizing the presentation of data. This is what led me to my final project, Holding Pattern, which I hope to continue exploring in the creative computation workshop next term (my temporary stand-in for DH Methods, and ultimately, my DH method of choice).

Holding Pattern is a methodological experiment aimed towards fundamentally transforming an audience’s experience of critical scholarship through the possibilities latent in code. By leaning into the computer’s capacity for lag and glitch, and tapping into the possibilities for authorship opened up through web design that go beyond the words on a page or a digital essay’s choice of font, I imagine using digital poetics to underpin a scholarly argument. As a writer and amateur coder who’s spent a lot of time deciding whether or not to fully immerse myself in the argumentative logics of the academy, this feels like an exciting discovery.

On a scholarly level, I am interested in studying at the intersection of disability studies and media theory. Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne’s concept of dismediation has been of huge importance to me in conceiving the possibilities for theorizing disability that extend beyond typical forms of advocacy. Moreover, dismediation gets at the ways that technology has been both literally and figuratively conceived through the mechanisms of disability. To me, hold music offers its own set of crip aesthetics — both in the way that it takes up time within the context of capitalist “signal culture,” and its multiple layers of sonic compression that create a uniquely garbled audio quality many times removed from the “original.” I’m excited to delve more into the material context of how and where these tracks emerge, and consider the implications of this history on the function of the contemporary clinic at large.

When I first began considering different project proposals, one thing always piqued my interest, diving into the world of birds. Growing up in NYC with my family, I grew up having a unique perspective on urban birds and their coexistence with us New Yorkers. They are a part of our daily lives. We see them hanging around telephone wires, waddling on the streets in between pedestrians and cars, and see them flocking around throughout the city landscape. They are just as much a part of our city as we are. However, there is limited data on their interactions with humans. Throughout the decades, we’ve placed our fears, issues, and revolved city policies around the urban Pigeons of NYC. This shapes much of our public opinion of these birds throughout the years.

There was once a time when they were viewed as trusted messengers, to fun sports competitors, companions, urban pests all the way up to current views as cultural icons. All of these various perspectives shifted throughout the century despite very little changing about Pigeons themselves. This indicates that humans have ever-changing perspectives on others, which in many ways is a reflection of our world. As I dived deeper into this topic, one clear thing consistently showed up in my research, there is no central archive or informational source documenting all of these articles of information, especially within newspapers. It isn’t hard to find these stories, yet it is dispersed all across the internet and libraries.

My project, Archiving the Urban Pigeon, aims to create a centralized archive documenting all of these newspaper headlines to share these stories. The goal is to consider how we as humans can provide a sense of digital memory for other species whom we have a shared environment with. Throughout this, we can expand the idea of Digital Humanities not only as a human endeavor but rather an interspecies approach. In many ways, we fail to share the stories and lives of other species within our archives despite the immense impact we have had on almost every species across the globe. While we can’t do it for all of them all at once, starting locally in NYC can allow us to glance the foundations of how this can be done little by little.