The Sounds of Music group achieved tremendous progress during this week.

Monday Meeting Minutes

On Monday, April 4th, 2022, we had a productive meeting, during which we discussed:

• Whether or not we were meeting our milestones. We concluded that we are indeed, and that all in all, we only had to push back a few deadlines, most recently of a Sounds of Music manifesto.
• We spoke a bit more about redesigning our pilot, and who to invite. We are finalizing our participant list. 
• We explored the idea of bringing Jeremy on as a facilitator.
• We are still debating what to do with our allotted 200 dollars, once it comes through.
• We also did a brief sing-along of “Down in the Valley,” with Felicity playing the piano.
• We discussed what music we’d been listening to as of late. Caitlin brought up “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” by the Platters, a song that was popular the year her mother was born, and had flown into her radar during a family genealogy project.

Wednesday Meeting Minutes

We worked on the Sounds of Music Manifesto, but were unable to complete it in one session. This is on our agenda for next Monday’s meeting. 

Tasks Accomplished & To Complete

Caitlin worked on the website, specifically the Accessibility Toolkit. 

Raquel completed the Accessibility Toolkit. Caitlin will work on transferring the remainder of it to the website in the coming week.

Raquel has been working on creating an accessible PDF that will read each slide to the viewer. She will also develop the CSV (version of the Excel document that has been storing our preliminary data and primary resources).

Felicity will be working on the format for the music program, as well as proofreading and suggesting edits to the website. Caitlin will work on implementing these edits. 

Our Gantt Chart

Modeling Value in the Anthropocene has regressed into a bit of entropy this week, as Brian’s immune system has experienced plague-induced degeneration and Hampton has come up against the structural incompleteness of his mind and his reality. Brian was unfortunately checked out for a week and a half due to a bout with COVID-19 while Hampton continued to dig further into word2vec and word embedding.

We have gotten to a point where our text is cleaned (with the cleaned version being stored locally on our machines), and we have successfully been able to play around with a word2vec model that has been pre-trained on a large corpus of text from Wikipedia. The end-goal we are working toward involves performing calculations on certain vectors from this pre-trained model with vectors from a model that we want to train on our Stiegler text. Now that we have successfully used the pre-train model, the next step for us is to train the model on our text. The problem that Hampton has been confronted with is a simple one, which is that of merely loading our cleaned text into our programming environment to begin to do so. This is where we run into problems as pirate digital humanists without a real background in computer science. However, we are very fortunate to be surrounded by a wealth of human beings with more experience than us who are willing to assist us. We have a second meeting with Leanne from the Digital Fellows Friday to figure out how to import our corpus and get back to work.

This situation (both Brian’s falling ill and Hampton’s Python woes) have also been a valuable lesson in two important Stieglerian concepts, adoption and quasi-causality (which he adopts from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari). For Stiegler, following Heidegger, we are thrown into a world which has the character of being already-there, a world which pre-exists us and world over which we do not have control. We learn from Stiegler that the responsibility of the non-inhuman is to adopt this situation (of our lack of mastery over being) as necessary, and in so doing to make it quasi-causal for us. We do not have control over the initial blows that the world deals to us, but we do have the capacity to channel the libidinal energy that is generated as a result and make the situation the preindividual funds for a future-to-come. Working with Python is transforming the way we view failure, revealing its function as a departure point for progress.

Spoiler alert: I am uploading this a day late, so we have already met with Leanne, with whom we had the most productive meeting possible. She assisted us with getting our corpus into our Jupyter notebook and has brought us to the point where our model is now trained on our corpus. The next step will be figuring out what calculations we need to perform on our corpora in order to produce a new vector for value in the Neganthropocene and relate this vector to other vectors in the Stiegler text and the Wikipedia corpus. We hope to shed some light on these calculations for next week, our week thus amounting to a lot of Google-assisted programming. This will be weaved through with our continuing close reading of the lectures, which continue to stimulate us emotionally and intellectually.

This week, we have made progress in line with our work plan. Benjamin had the unique opportunity to interview a current leader at a community garden. The interview consisted of a person who took care and even started a community garden before community gardens were a thing! The person describes how the city wanted to take the garden away from the residents and how they fought back against the city. As we described our digital work in progress, the  interviewee asked how can they see in real time the amount of produce available such as medicinal plants. It’s amazing how the interviewee describes their experience being at their community garden. Before I go in detail, we are currently in the process of transcribing the entire thirty minute interview to upload on our website. 

There is a social media twitter update: https://twitter.com/gardens_dh 

With wonderful photos embedded in the tweet. With our Facebook page, we updated the profile post and posted some photos as well. 

With our data collection, we created a have also created a specific file in where we can organize and pin point where some gardens have produce and those who do not. 

in this screenshot can see that there are more red than green indicating that many of these gardens in this small sample can actually offer produce to the local community. 

We are also heavily working on creating data visualization for the website. Thankfully we have enough sourced data files to start comparing and contrasting. We are focusing on learning how to use Tableau and are fortune enough to set up a meeting with a fellow in order to create some stunning stories and narratives for our website soon enough. Below is a screenshot of our current progress. While this is a draft visualization, we can safely say we are going on the correct route. 

What you see here is a density visualization of how many community gardens are located in a particular zip code; the bigger the circle, the more gardens are located. We also are comparing it to a 2018 household income data map based on how light or dark a zipcode is shown. 

Our Work plan is constantly changing. 

We added some new timelines on our ethnographic work as well as creating more data sets with a more standard bar/pie chart instead of mapping everything. 

The mainframe project team is into week two of grinding on logistics and scaffolding for the archive. Our weekly meeting focused on two efforts: (a) identifying some missing non-technical dependencies and (b) setting up local development environments. The good news is we’re still within range of our Phase 2 milestones:

• Decide which materials (photos, articles, books) needed for project and how it will be organized
  • Assign: Both
  • Deadline(s): 03/30
• Zine/Documentation revision (1)
  • Assign: Connie
  • Deadline(s): April 6th

One encouraging fact about the archive is that there are 500+ images that will be available! As far as we can discern, that is a legitimate archive size to begin with! In the midst of collecting images, we weren’t entirely sure we’d have enough.

There are some desirable parts of the archive that we may need to reconsider.

For example, while the images have been curated heavily, we haven’t review enough video material yet to make those a first class part of the archive. We need not eliminate video content we’ve found. We do plan on creating a ‘resources’ page with helpful books and websites, and embedded videos could be a compromise to get the videos included, even if they aren’t curated and surfaced in the same way as the images.

As a part of the revised proposal, we suggested that some or most of the archival material would be collaged and/or under go deformance. We’re still exploring this option under the deadline for this semester.

To Do This Week

• Fix broken images – there are a subset of images that aren’t rendering for some reason
• Upload last half of images – we’ve uploading only half of the images, which is a time/concentration consuming process; the rest will be uploaded this week
• Set up local dev environment – we did this last night
  • Generating and adding an ssh key to our repo
  • Cloning the repo
  • Installing ruby, non-ruby dependencies, and then installing ruby gems
  • Walking through the commands necessarily to generate and serve the website from your computer before pushing and publishing changes
• Develop color palette / design – we have only made small changes to the design thus far; some colorblind people may not be able to see text using the current color scheme
• Build out the navigation – this will flesh out what contextual text is missing, and where we need to fill in the gaps
• Remove wax project cruft – there are some textual and code references to the wax project’s demo site that we need to replace 😉
• Finalize (?) logos maybe – we have a logo, but it wouldn’t work well for say a social media avatar; we’re exploring options; maybe we don’t need to use the logo for social media?

The original target for the Sounds of Music proposal was a population of elderly individuals who or may not be handicapped, who are probably stuck at home, and who have felt the strains of isolation, whether 70 or 80, or 90.

We have expanded our target audience, but are still focused on targeting an elderly population. We have designed for accessibility. Our thinking has been informed by the hypothetical ‘extreme user’ with possible disabilities that might prevent them from accessing our program.

So far, we’ve made remarkable progress on the website, our accessibility toolkits, our pre-pilot program, and redesigning a future pilot program based on feedback gathered during our pre-pilot.

Meeting Minutes

During our meeting on Wednesday, March 31^st, we discussed possible program redesigns for our pilot program, and how to integrate the feedback we had gotten in our pre-pilot program.

We spoke about the potential of participants taking a questionnaire in advance of a pilot program. Felicity expressed the legitimate concern that each button that needs to be pressed poses a barrier to access and an interruption to our program. With each additional step, we lose the interest of potential participants.

We continued to discuss our program itinerary and decided to provide context about each song before we play it, in order to stimulate engagement with the music and evoke memories of times gone by. In this vein, we wish to offer narrative guidance for our audience.

One of our primary goals is to motivate our audience to respond to the music, so it’s important to select music that will resonate with them.

We also spoke about how we wanted to guide discussion in such a way that memories arise organically.

We discussed also what kind of discussion we wished to promote amongst our pilot audience in order to spur memories and emotional reactions in a fluid, natural manner. We decided that our roles were as curators of music, and facilitators of conversation – our job was more to gently guide rather than to directly influence the flow of discussion.

We wanted to strike a balance between providing too much direction, versus not enough guidance for a group of people who may or may not know each other. We wanted to avoid awkward silences, but allow for productive, thoughtful silences.

Our wish is to create a friendly and welcoming environment. It’s our job to create an ambiance of warmth and congeniality.

More Thoughts

For an audience we don’t know, we must be quite general.  If we get an idea of something the group responds to, we can respond in kind.

For other occasions, it would be easy to create a specific program, one that centered around:

• A Brazilian Samba,
• Italian songs everyone knows and loves,
• Songs for month of April, or to celebrate spring,
• Celebrating life coming back to NYC,
• The opening of the Baseball Season,
• Programs centered around specific figures, like “Old Blue Eyes,”
• And hundreds more possibilities…

Next Steps

We decided to hold a pilot program on Monday, April 25^th, at 2 PM. We agreed on the following abbreviated schedule:

Introduction

Participants have the opportunity to tell us and each other a little about themselves, and to introduce themselves, their names, and whatever else springs to mind.

Part 1: Warm Up

In order to get people ‘warmed up,’ we’ll start with a singalong, perhaps of Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World,” or another tune that everyone knows.

Part 2: Connections

We’ll share tunes that facilitate a discussion about personal connections and associations that might arise from the music. Songs that seemed to resonate in our pre-pilot included Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

Part 3: The Role of Performance

We’ll them share songs that facilitate discussion about the role of performance on musical experiences. A possible activity is the compassion of two versions of the same or similar songs that explore different forms of performances / visual experiences.

Part 4: Singalong with Live Music

We should finish our session with a singalong song or two, with Felicity playing the piano. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” would be a wonderful stopping point, and leave the audience feeling good, thus ending on a high note.

Milestones

We have hit the vast majority of our major milestones thus far, and have set new milestones as we have completed tasks earlier than anticipated. Our project has been evolving as we’ve worked on it. The Sounds of Music has come to a stage where it is developing quite organically in two twin directions – that of outreach to the general public in the form of our website, which includes a working model of our latency toolkit, and the start of our accessibility toolkit, as well as a blog where we have begun to post related resources; and our pre-pilot and pilot programs, which have informed our thinking about our website as well as how to reach our target audience.

In the next week, we will continue to work on creating a program guideline for us to follow when facilitating our pilot program. In time, it is possible that this will evolve into a template for others to recreate their own music enrichment programs, both in public and private settings, amongst friends, and in a variety of other contexts and settings.

This week, Raquel hopes to finish the accessible version of our Accessibility Toolkit. Once it is converted into PDF form and finalized, Caitlin will go about populating the website will the remainder of the information. Felicity will continue to find songs for our pilot program, as well as research them to provide context and lend narrative structure to our discussion.

To get an idea of what the website will look like aesthetically, I created a tumblr and added some photos so people can have an idea to what material we have compiled. 

Link to the tumblr here.

And also to keep updating the zine to document our process:

A To Do List

1. Keep updating CSV
2. Writing context for mainframes for the website.
3. Create and Instagram and twitter.
4. Finalize on logo. 
5. Create tumblr to display all the material we have found – use it as a reference point for how Wax would end up looking like.

The Sounds of Music group has made great progress on our website, our latency toolkit, and our accessibility toolkits, as well as our pre-pilot program, which we launched on Monday, March 21st, 2022 in order to solicit feedback on relevant areas of our pilot program. 

As the week wears on, we will be focusing on taking what we learned from our pre-pilot program and applying it to a new, revamped pilot program. 

Website:

The website is still a work-in-progress, but we have made significant progress on fleshing it out and filling it with relevant information.

We have an accessibility toolbar on the leftmost side of the screen. 

Latency Toolkit:

The latency toolkit is also very much a work in progress. Curation is our main concern in this regard. We will be adding to it as our research continues, as well as sorting it by a logical navigational scheme. 

Accessibility Toolkit(s):

These toolkits have been compiled on Google Sheets, and need to be added to the website. Raquel is working on creating a downloadable version of the toolkits in PDF format. Again, curation is an issue, but we decided as a team that we will provide information and metadata about each source, in order to facilitate seamless navigation and ease of use. 

Pre-Pilot Program:

We held a pilot program with eight participants, six of whom ranged in age from 82-92.  One of the younger women was a caregiver for a 93-year-old man, and another, a woman in her seventies, has been through multiple surgeries, chemo, and radiation in the last few years, and is relying on a walker at the present time. Two were well over ninety, and both had serious hearing problems and more recent visual difficulties. Others were in their eighties, competent, intelligent people who were beginning to cope with problems of old age while simultaneously affected by the Covid isolation.

We received useful, substantial criticism, and everyone was positive. People found the project valuable and in need of attention for various reasons:

•  It opens roads for further research as people age and populations grow (including a suggestion that we include discussion on research regarding isolation, aging, handicap, etc.).
• It is a terrific and timely idea with opportunities for expansion in many directions.
• It needs structure and continuity.
• It needs to focus on what elderly people will respond to – i.e., music they know and love.
• It requires a knowledge of the population we will serve, and we need to focus on those people and their interests.
• We should pick a genre and not float around with so many different possibilities.
• We provided too many suggestions. Unable to take it all in.
• The program needs a narrative.
• Storytelling set to music is important. When you’re able to “connect” to what’s being played, uneducated music brains are taken to a place to connect with the song/music at a deeper level.
• There’s no better cure for the heart and mind than singing along to what one can relate to.
• The kinks need to be worked out, but the idea is brilliant.

Tasks for the Following Week:

• Create, design, and curate a new, updated Sounds of Music pilot program based on feedback gathered from the attendees of our pre-pilot program (Felicity & Raquel)
• Create and curate an updated collection of musical selections for use in the pilot with special attention to length, video content, and potential connections with our participants (Felicity & Caitlin)
• Continue to develop our visual identity on the website (All)
• Continue to transfer Accessibility Toolkits onto the website (Caitlin)
• Continue to create a downloadable PDF version of the Accessibility Toolkit(s) (Raquel)
• Write and create a new blog post for the website: a list of Related Resources of online musical enrichment programs and activities that we have found helpful (Caitlin)

The Mainframe Project has started building out our initial version of the web archive. This means creating a website using the Wax library and setting up a publicly available git repository to allow for multiple code contributors. This stage represents a useful milestone. Why?

• We may do work that will be thrown away, and that’s OK; it fosters learning (see near future blog posts for why this might be the case)
• Building a website will reveal the places where our research is adequate, and where we need to need to fortify
• Creating a concrete artifact to respond to is better than a notional planning or concept of what the archive may be
• The end product of the project exists, even in nascent form 
• We have a landing page to which we can point interested parties

Highlights

Information architecture

Archival projects scream out for structure. Not only is the material curated, but a visitor must be able to anchor their understanding of the collection with categorical filters. Our information architecture document is an initial attempt to understand how a visitor may navigate of the entire collection.

Metadata

We’ve started to organize our metadata. Our collection of images likely comprises a full archive of mainframe and pre-personal computing visual material. Still, we understand the archive image by image, and need to conceive of it as a collection. We’ll be dumping our entire photo catalog to get a sense of which subcategories and filters make sense for our collection. Our emphasis at this time is on producing the potential collection filterable by many criteria, rather than defining what the archive will be ahead of time by the end of the semester. Valuing “working software over comprehensive documentation” is a critical insight more than 30 years old. 

Repository

A publicly available repository is valuable for encouraging contributions from outside of the Mainframe Project’s intial contributors. Working on our project is only a pull request away. Given the current size of the project, we can support non-technical folks in adding images and scholarly and general audience blog posts. Using git/Github and Wax represents “a relatively high but general-purpose learning curve.” Learning how the web works in a generally applicable way enhances our understanding of digital production as humanities scholars. Working in a software repository helps make digital work visible.

Over the past few days my team and I have focused our efforts towards our outreach plan. Because our project is based upon being informative and providing new data on community gardens we have labeled our work as being a form of awareness as well. In order to get the word out there about our research and data we knew providing  platforms of outreach was integral. Our hope for this project has always been to help the niche audience we are trying to target, so in order to do so we have already set up a digital footprint for ourselves to present our information.

The first web item we have established is a twitter page(https://twitter.com/gardens_dh). As stated before on our social media/outreach plan we decided to go with the networking service for a number of reasons. First being the fact that we wanted our presence to be known on a site that is known to host professional and educational accounts and organizations. Our tone for our project is meant to be informative and educational so we felt twitter was a better option in comparison to instagram and tik tok. Furthermore we wanted a place where we could share findings (online and our own) and connect with others that are involved with green spaces in NYC. We are still in the beginning stages of our twitter since we are still developing our visualizations and logo. For now we left a tweet telling potential followers/viewers that we will have a website up soon..Each week the twitter will be updated by a member of the group. Once we have the bulk of our website finished we will share the link on our page and have a proper header and icon image

Our website in question is a site hosted on the CUNY Academic Commons (https://digitalgarden.commons.gc.cuny.edu/). This web page will display our data visualizations and findings and will also feature a tab that will include audio files taken from interviews in accordance to our ethnographic research. Due to the fact that we are still in the workshopping phase of our website, we don’t know yet how many tabs we will have featured on our page. Perhaps we will create one for various photos we have taken at the gardens as well, since some of us were able to individually visit some during spats of pleasant weather. 2 of our photos have already been used when designing the appearance of our site. The background image was taken at Clinton Community Garden while the header image is from Liz Christy Garden (these images may be subject to change in the event we find something else more suitable). Our font and highlight color are a dark green to keep in theme with the nature aspect of our project. We made the conscious decision to make the shade of green darker than our counterparts Greenthumb and NYCGovParks who opted for a lighter shade of green. This was kind of our subtle way to show that we were a different kind of community garden site, not one that the public has seen before. Aside from our customizations our site for now has an home page describing our project and an about us section that features our personal bios. Additionally our page is public so that those who visit our twitter can click on a link to our site. We are also planning on sending out the url to community garden leaders and those who we wish to interview. Please feel free to visit our site once we have more information up. 

Aside from Twitter and our Cuny commons site we have also decided to start a Facebook page (NYC Community Gardens – Home | Facebook). Our page thus far has some photos taken at community gardens we visited. Once we start visualizing our findings we will try to incorporate that as well. As we mentioned before, community garden Facebook pages are quite inactive but as a way to connect with gardens and message them directly we will keep our Facebook page up. This will also be used as another account to promote our website.  

Lastly, our team member Benjamin has already made progress in the interview section of our project. We managed to get an interview from the oldest community garden member (from 1972)  from the oldest community garden in NYC. The interview audio will be on our website soon. Be sure to check it out once it’s uploaded! Without giving too much away of what he said, we will say that he did mention that he is interested in the specific produce gardens have. This will be something I’ll be looking into soon. Next week Benjamin will be going to East Village for another interview!

Going Forward 

Heading into next week we will continue on our path to visualizing and playing around with the features on Tableau. Since we want to make connections with our data to convey information and stories that have not have had coverage yet, we are utilizing the layering technique for our Tableau maps. Using this will allow us to show 2 forms of data at once which will in turn give the audience a sense of correlation when viewing the infographic. We have already reached out to a Digital Fellow for further assistance on this task and they will hopefully be getting back to us soon. Additionally with some advice taken from Professor. Maney we will also be cleaning up some features on our social media and website. The inclusion of a contact tab and logo image will be up by the end of the week (hopefully). Throughout the rest of the week and the next our work will be more conducive to website building as this will be the main product of our final project.

“We need to make every single thing accessible to every single person with a disability.” – Stevie Wonder

Dearest Colleagues,

You will find the link to our webpage here.

I am excited to debut it. It is currently public, but not yet visible to search engines, a visibility status I intend on changing once our prototype draws nearer to completion.

Some things to turn your attention to:

• There is an accessibility toolbar on the leftmost side of the screen. It allows you to toggle through a combination of high-contrast, grayscale, and/or large-font modes.
• Our Latency toolkit is far more populated than our Accessibility Toolkit, the latter of which is still very much a page in construction.
• We have an ‘About’ page and a ‘Contributors’ page, which may or may not be combined as the semester progresses. Your thoughts on this are welcome, colleagues.
• We have a blog! There are currently only two entries, but for those of you who love it when casual Star Trek references are successfully slipped into serious work, please check out the latest blog post.
• We are still grappling with our visual identity, and many of the images are placeholders. Thoughts on which images resonate most with you are also appreciated.

Thank you all in advance for checking out website-in-progress! Please do note that it is very much a work in progress. It is a prototype, one that is ever-evolving as our research narrows and expands by degrees, and takes us in exciting new directions. We trust you will be both kind and honest in your critique of our website as it stands today, should you choose to offer us feedback – a gesture which would be very much appreciated by all of us on the Sounds of Music team.

I encourage you to revisit our website in the coming weeks, as I believe the Accessibility Toolkit might be of interest and import to most of your projects.

Cordially Yours,

Caitlin Cacciatore