Modeling Value in the Anthropocene | Outreach & Social Media Plan

Considering the esoteric nature of Bernard Stiegler’s work in addition to the niche branch of natural language processing that is word embedding, Modeling Value in the Anthropocene intends to engage with scholars from both fields through its unique use of computational tools applied to the world of philosophy. Though our project will likely resonate most with those working closely with the theoretical and technical approaches found in Modeling Value in the Anthropocene, it is our hope that through our findings we are able to capture a broader scope of attention including that of students of philosophy, digital humanist developers and researchers, and recreational readers of theory.

Intended Audience

As noted above, our intended audience is primarily scholars familiar with the work of Bernard Stiegler and students of the digital humanities. However, due to our belief that Stiegler’s work is an invaluable contribution to philosophically navigating the Capitalocene, it is our hope that broader audiences can be reached, given the time, through a variety of “popularized” outreach approaches to be detailed below.

In addition to this, we also intend to reach out to the Internation Collective, which operates as an international body of transdisciplinary researchers concerned with the questions and objectives opened up and pursued by Bernard Stiegler until his passing. As far as we know, there is no one in this group, nor anyone in surrounding orbits who is undertaking these questions and objectives utilizing distant reading methods. We find the work we are engaging with to be important to this potential audience because this kind of research is related to that which Stiegler called for through the utilization of computational tools to generate new knowledges.

Online Presence

For the time being, our online presence will predominantly consist of a website landing page hosted on the CUNY Academic Commons that details our approach, processes, and findings. Ideally, this will also provide some initiatory information giving those who visit our site a brief and digestible introduction to Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy, publications, and biography, along with additional resources for further reading and analysis. This might come to exist as the “NeganthropoZine” detailed below.

If given the time, we also intend on presenting our project as a model and template for other philosophical inquiries explored through word2vec analysis, with the hope of fostering a community of scholars operating similarly across multiple disciplines.

Social Media

Given that this type of project doesn’t lend itself to a conventional social media profile, we intend on reaching out to a variety of popular philosophy and theory YouTube channels (PlasticPills, Epoch Philosophy, etc.), podcasts (Acid Horizon, New Books Network’s New Work in the Digital Humanities, etc.), and blogs (such as Sam Kinsley’s Spatial Machinations) in order to establish a “social network” of contacts with the hope of working in some collaborative capacity to promote both Stiegler’s work and our project’s findings. This could result in anything from participating in a discussion-based podcast episode with other scholars to jointly producing a blog post or article exploring Stiegler’s Nanjing Lectures through the context of our project, opening up unknown but exciting potentials for the breadth of our project’s reach.

Scholarly Engagement

Though the results are impossible to anticipate, we intend on reaching out to Bernard Stiegler’s longtime associate and translator, Daniel Ross, as well as the author of The Thought of Bernard Stiegler: Capitalism, Technology, and the Politics of Spirit, Ross Abbinnett. Each is a leading figure amongst the small collection of English speaking Stieglerian scholars and have been recently willing to participate in modest, up-and-coming podcasts (such as Daniel Ross’s recent appearance on the Life from Plato’s Cave podcast and Ross Abbinnett’s discussion on a Geomedia Karlstad episode in 2019) so we are hopeful that a brief discussion with either of these scholars is not an impossibility. This, of course, comes in conjunction with our aforementioned outreach to the Internation Collective.

Additionally, we plan on contacting Open Humanities Press, the international open access publishing initiative that published many of Stiegler’s works before his passing, to discuss the possibility of submitting our findings as a journal proposal for future development.

Non-Scholarly Engagement

In an effort to breathe life into the typically dry nature of academic text, there is a strong possibility that both Stiegler t-shirts and a “Neganthropocene Zine” will be created to facilitate further outreach. The shirt, likely embellished with a quote and topical digital illustrations, will come equipped with a scannable QR code that acts to quickly link those curious to our project’s landing page. The “NeganthropoZine” will act as a concise, printable pamphlet for those unfamiliar with Bernard Stiegler’s work, allowing key terms and concepts to be elucidated so that those interested in our project are provided a digestible resource detailing its theoretical framework.

 

Audience:

The project aims to develop a historical collection of catalogues, magazines, photographs, print advertisements, illustrations, and manuscripts documenting the history of computers as a cultural reference. Coming from CUNY, a public institution that values accessibility of education, we strive to make the collection accessible to anyone, from professional researchers to those with a more casual interest in computer history. It aims to be a resource for technologists, media ecologists, archivists, designers, and artists alike.

Computers have made a position in media, culture, the work place, etc. One way to examine impact is through brochures and advertising materials companies have produced to promote their products. It represents the culmination of a companies work, from the design and development of the products to marketing and promotion of the brand, and how this process has changed over time.

Social Media Strategy:

We will create Instagram and Twitter accounts to use these platforms for promotion and build relationships with the audiences and share content. The social media manager will post at least one photo per day on Instagram. Because Instagrams algorithm is complicated, the times of the Instagram posts will be crucial. According to an articles posted on statusbrew.com, the best times to post on Instagram are between 10AM & 3PM, ideally either before work, during lunch, & after work with the context that most users work 9-5 and on weekdays. For Twitter, the best time to post is at 9AM all days of the week. Tweeting during happy hours at 5PM and 6PM garners high engagement, as people just get off their work and check their feeds. Although tweeting may reduced to one to two tweets per week.

To maintain user engagement, the website as well as Instagram will be able to accept submissions from users who wish to share their own documents, images, photographs that they believe is engaging and note worthy. Contributors can include graduate students, curators, archivists, or technology enthusiasts.

The ideal tone on our platforms will be casual, but also educational.

Because we are using Wax, we want to try to promote our archive in their examples, and potentially post about our existence in the code4lib slack channel, twitter, etc.

Communication and Website:

We will promote the project with a foundation that includes a completed basic: landing page, about page, Brows Collections, Resources, and a process blog which recaps our research processes and significant images we particularly liked. The blog may be construed into a zine in PDF format for users to browse through.

Visual Identity & Logo:

A logo is still in the process of being created.

Audience

Our project “Welcome to the digital garden” wishes to explore and engage an audience in community gardens by digital means. By mapping different data we are creating first hand visuals for the user who wishes to explore what a community garden is in New York City by bringing in different perspectives. Furthermore we are opening up the possibility to explore and interact by asking questions and crossing different datasets. We wish to aim the project towards the people who are engaged in community gardens and want to learn more about them on a broader scale through a digital humanities perspective, both to highlight strength and weakness in the work being done across New York City. When considering our intended audience we found it important to analyze who could potentially benefit and be interested in our project. There could be many different actors in the field of community gardens since we are exploring different aspects of them. It could be on a political, educational and academic level. However, to narrow down the scope of who we wish to target specifically we believe we would be most helpful and relevant to those already engaged in community garden work. This accounts for organizations and academics as well. In other words we are targeting volunteers, coordinators and scholars who wish to strengthen the effort done around community garden work.

Communication channels and tone

Through the project we will get a better understanding of the intended audience and their needs and resources, but our main communication will be online through our website and outreach channels. We are additionally gonna present our project to the gardens who we are in contact with through our small ethnographic research. To understand our audience’s use of SoMe we mapped out what platforms the “official” gardens use (not volunteers). Few of them have a website and twitter but most have a facebook and/or an instagram, albeit with little activity

With our project we wish to create a website that is informative whilst showing different important perspectives. The tone for communicating will be educational, inspiring and enlightening. We hope to create a trust in our work that is legit and worth considering and exploring further. Therefore our main choice of social media is twitter. This for two main reasons. Firstly twitter corresponds with our wish for communication between different individuals and communities. The comment section on Twitter encourages discourse within those who find the tweet engrossing. We hope through this outlet those who are interested in community gardening will find a way to link and connect with those already involved or are looking to be involved. Furthermore, the weblink tweeted on our profile should ideally lead to more traffic on our website through likes and shares. In addition we are also considering starting a Facebook page. In many cases it works well for communities of shared interest in groups, which could become relevant for us to share our work. However this will only happen if our research shows us that our audience uses the platform actively.

Social media strategy

One of our goals with this project is to create awareness about community gardens and therefore we will be working on social media alongside our project. The main purpose of our twitter will be to get people to visit our website and engage with the content. We will share the responsibility of posting and engaging with our twitter accounts, so one person is in charge each week. Firstly we will follow relevant people and organizations in the field of community gardens, secondly we will develop content that will revolve around topics directly related to our project. Our content will be news and research shared from others, our own findings and perspectives and lastly a more personal approach with updates on our progress concerning the website. Each post will include a link to our website and we will use different relevant hashtags together with tagging different organizations. Since our audience is a specific group of interested people we don’t aim for a lot of followers or a lot of engagement in our posts but we are hoping to reach at least some people working with community gardens to visit our social media accounts and site.

Website and outreach

Our final product is a website so we will not be working on an additional one as a promotion site. Instead our twitter account will serve as our means of communicating the progress of our website. We will test it before launching and get a review from outside individuals before making final adjustments. After the website is done we will share it and publish in relevant networks to spread the word.

Types of data

The types of data present as a part of the Mainframe: Past-Present project will consist primarily of images and text. Images will be stored as JPEGs while text will be rendered from markdown. We may have video content embedded in the website, which would be stored on a publicly accessible Vimeo collection. Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, hex editors, and software libraries like pixelsort and glitch-this will be used in deformance of original archival content. During archival material collection, Dropbox will be used to share images from archives and magazines. All images and writing will hosted on a publicly visible Github repository, which will be mirrored on GitLab for backup/redundancy, and an alternative hosting platform.

Standards for documentation & metadata

Deformance process will be documented as a part of the website content. Both Wax and CollectionBuilder are informed by FAIR Principles for Library, Archive and Museum Collections. Images will follow the naming convention of description_source_year or source_volume_edition_page#_year. Directory structure and location for images and texts are prescribed by the frameworks mentioned above, which we will follow absent any argument for changing those defaults. Metadata for the collection will be available to browse on the website, and will be downloaded as a csv.

Data reuse, accessibility, sharing

Images, text, and website code will be shared in git repository hosting sites Github and GitLab, and available for cloning and forking via git. Original archival images and deformanced versions will be available for download from a web browser or via the git repo. If video content is provided in the archive, instructions for using youtube-dl will be written and available. Due to the experimental nature of this project, reuse is permissible under the FreeBSD license.

Preservation & long term access

Mainframes: Past-Present will be available on both Github and GitLab, where hosting is free. In the event that we don’t have funding for a domain name, the archives will still be accessible. If desirable, we will create a BagIt bag for the project with bagit-python to be stored at the CUNY’s Mina Rees Library.

Week 4 

Work task:

What is a Community Garden in the Digital Age? Finalized

Deadlines: Upload new and revised Project Proposal to Course Website (Faihaa)

Week 5 (March 2)

Work task:

Data Collection Breakdown (Faihaa/Nelson)

Brainstorm questions and explore data available online. Spend 2-3 hours (Faihaa/Nelson/Benjamin)

Check to see if each borough has 311 open data

Deadlines: 

– Discuss and brainstorm specific data our project will account for

– Analyze data information already available

Week 6 (March 09)

Work task:

Finalize specific data we wish to use

Organize data into separate spreadsheets (Faihaa)

Design ethnographic research and reach out to community gardens (Benjamin) 

Deadlines:

– Workplan

– Data Management Plan (Nelson)

-Personal Journal Entries (3/8/22)

-Group Outreach/Social Media Plan Group Project Update (3/10/22) (TBD)

Meetings:

Tuesday 9 of March 12.00: Group meeting

Friday 12 of March 11.00: Group meeting

Week 7  (March 16)

Work task:

Start to upload info on to Tableau (Nelson)

Use visualization and spreadsheets to find connections and discrepancies (Faihaa, Nelson, Benjamin)

Start looking into Website options to display visualizations

Do interviews and participations for ethnographic research

Deadlines: 

– Tableau Map

-Personal Journal Entries (3/15/22)

Meetings:

Tuesday 16 of March 12.00: Group meeting

Week 8 (March 23)

Work Task: 

– Create a draft on what website can potentially look like and start building the website

– Discuss what we wish to include on landing page, tabs etc

– Do interviews and participations for ethnographic research

– Start transcribing ethnographic interviews

Deadlines: 

Personal Journal Entries (3/22/22)

Group Project Updates (3/24/22)

Meetings:

Friday 26 of March 11.00: Group meeting

Week 9- Week 11 (March 30-April13)

Work Task: 

Work on website 

Highlight new data found

Create powerpoint presentation on project

Continue doing interviews and analyze ethnographic data

Deadlines: 

Personal Journal Entries (3/29/22 4/5/22 4/12/22)

Group Project Updates (3/31/22 4/7/22 4/14/22)

Week 12  

SPRING BREAK 

Work Task:

Independent Work on Project permitting time 

Week 13- Week 14 (April 27-May 11)

Work Task: 

Final adjustments to data visualizations and website.

Audio from interviews uploaded.

Work on Written portion of project

End of week 14 have a website/platform ready for feedback and review

Deadlines: Personal Journal Entries (4/26/22 5/3/22)

Group Project Update (4/28/22)

Week 15 

Work Task: 

Smaller adjustments to website/platform from feedback session

Prepare for project launch

Finalize website

Deadlines: 

Finish final website

Week 16 (May 18)

Work Task: 

All work should be completed!

Deadlines: Post Final Group Project to Commons

Email individual reflections to Prof. Maney

 

 

 

• What are the types of data that may be produced as part of this project?
  • This data will be collected via already publicly available data from websites such as NYC Opendata, GreenThumb Gardens website, GrowNYC among other individual community Garden websites. We will also focus on completely different sets of available datasets such as income by location in NYC, food deserts in NYC, among other ideas that will come up. In the following weeks, one of our team members will start to reach out to the community and begin an ethnographic study. This data will be new and be produced, edited by the team as a whole. It will consist of some recorded interviews as audio-file, transcription of the interviews and handwritten notes from visiting different community gardens. We plan to use information that the participants allow us to share. Information such as quotes, pseudonyms and overall group trends will be shared, and each interview will be stored on our shared google drive. This data is completely static and as long as the original hosting website is available, there should be a minimal risk of losing data. The only new data that will be produced is our cross analysis of any trends we see among different data sets. Extrapolation would be our “new data.” This would be stored in our shared google drive as our main document management system. This data would be static and this can evolve over time but we do not expect this to evolve during the next few months. We are planning to use free available software such as Tableau online and possible wordpress websites. TBD on the amount of data we are able to present. During this project we are using Google drive that is linked to three of our google accounts. If one of us loses access, then one of the other two can download any past data. We can also email or message each other with documents so we can have different avenues of sharing data.

• What standards will you be using for data collection, documentation, description, and metadata?
  • We will continue to use google drive for our dataset storage. We will aim to download easy to open files formats such as Excel, CVS, Word Documents. We will document any findings in a shared MS Word document file. Our Ethnographer will determine if any information is deemed private and will determine how to store that data in a private separate file. We will all review the way we store the documents, we will constantly vet and modify the files as we see fit and bring up any data that seems confidential to the team. We should all be responsible for informing each other with anything we see. We will have folders with file hierarchy such as organizing per week or per location. We will name each file with a main topic on the title and update it as we add on to the document.  We will use standard data naming conventions as “Final project” or “interviews on xx/xx”

• What steps will you take to protect your or your participant’s security, privacy/confidentiality, intellectual property, or other rights? (Check current university policies for requirements.)
  • We will have complete ownership of interview data, we will determine if the interview data should be kept confidential in the most ethical way.  Each visit and interview we make with community gardens, we will make it clear if the wish to be private and to what degree.  Additionally will we make it clear to them how we are gonna use the interviews and they are not obligated to answer and can step out of the project if they wish. Since we are using already available and public data, there should be minimal reason to restrict or review this data. However, as Data Humanists we would need to be careful on determining if this data can be used for political and Nefarious reasons. If so, we would try our best to broaden the datasets and naming conventions. 

• If you allow others to reuse your data, how will the data be accessed and shared?
  • The data we create and publish will be under standard sharing protocols. The data will not be restricted nor behind a paywall. We expect a large audience to use this information, one being community leaders themselves using this information to enhance their connection to their gardens. As we are extrapolating data as well, we expect future researchers to further this work or use it as a foundation for their research. We plan to export and publish this data on wordpress and/or CUNY commons. We hope this data will live as a historical preservation on data collected after the pandemic of 2020. 

• How will the data be archived for preservation and long-term access?
  • Our internal data collection and method of collection will be stored in our personal google drive accounts. The external data will be available until CUNY common is no longer available to the public. We will stick to simple, ample and easy to access formats like Microsoft Office.

The Data

The original data source for the text is a searchable PDF file that is publicly available for free via Open Humanities Press’ website. We will also be appropriating Python scripts for running word embedding models also available online for free. Lastly, we will be generating notes to be stored in Jupyter Notebook files. The text and Python data will be regenerable so longs as the sources remain public and free. The PDF file will be converted to plain text. The code will initially be stored as .py files. Any visualizations will be image files (type TBD). The finished product (including code, text, and images) will be stored as an .ipynb Jupyter Notebook file. Jupyter Notebook will also be saved as PDF for sustainability. The tools we are utilizing are: Calibre for file conversion from PDF to .txt; Python and word2vec for text operationalization; Github for provisional code storage; Jupyter Notebook for project creation/storage. Github will be used to store, edit, and view code as we find, create, and alter it in the process of making. The final product will will also be stored on Github. We will backup files on our personal iClouds. File names will be the name of the author of the code and the version number. The different segments of code will be stored in the same directory on Github.

Data Standards

Data collection procedures are documented in a collaborative work place accessible as a collaborative .pages file. We are ensuring good project and data documentation via weekly in-person check-in meetings in addition to several virtual meetings per week. Both participants are responsible for implementing this data management plan. Project will follow the open access and open source practices of the Digital Humanities, the finished project being code and comments on said code that will be publicly available to all.

Data Security

Our data is not sensitive. There is no embargo period for our data. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License, which allows us to share and adapt the text, so long as appropriate credit is given and a link to the license is provided with an indication that changes were made.

Re-use and re-distribution of data

The sharing of the data from this project are not subject to any external requirements. Our hopeful audience is members of the philosophical community interested in appropriating computation methods for theorizing. We will publish the data on our public website in May 2022. Jupyter will necessary to access the data published.

Long Term Archiving and Preservation

Data will be stored for 5-10 years unless a more permanent means of storage becomes available in the meantime. Data should be archived for Stiegler scholars or other researchers interested in the Neganthropocene. Jupyter notebook(s) will be stored as PDF’s for sustainability. Data will be submitted to CUNY Academic Works for long-term maintenance. A subject-based archive may also be found appropriate if found.

1. What are the types of data that may be produced as part of this project?

• We will generate the following forms of data through research, browsing existing datasets, and amassing data about:
  • Accessibility data, as it pertains to live, synchronous music enrichment programs:
    • How to Use Zoom: A Beginner’s Guide.
    • How to Be Unafraid of Online Activities.
    • Equipment and Assistive Technologies to Help Individuals with Specific Disabilities and Handicaps:
      • Equipment and assistive technologies designed for the visually impaired and blind.
      • Equipment and assistive technologies designed for the deaf and hard of hearing.
      • Equipment and assistive technologies designed for those who are paraplegics or quadriplegics.
      • Equipment and assistive technologies designed for those who experience muscle weakness or another condition that hinders their ability to perform delicate and/or manual tasks.
      • How voice assistant technologies can be used or modified to provide more extensive assistance to those for whom accessibility is a concern.
    • Data about latency, as it pertains to live, synchronous music enrichment programs:
      • How to tackle the issue of latency during Zoom and other virtual meetings.
      • How to overcome the problem of real-time, synchronous communication.
    • Data about trouble-shooting, as it pertains to live, synchronous music enrichment programs.

 

• We will be generating survey data on whether or not the Sounds of Music pilot program enriches the lives of our participants.

 

• We will be using Google Docs, Google Sheets, which will eventually be migrated to more stable, non-proprietary forms such as PDF and .csv.

 

• Our greatest concern regarding the data is obsolescence. We fear that in light of the rate of advancement of assistive technologies, our data will quickly become obsolete.

 

• Our data will largely take the form of text and hyperlinks, as well as APA citations, including the date the original information was accessed.

 

2. What standards will you be using for data collection, documentation, description, and metadata?

 

We will collect data from consulting experts in the field of Disability Studies, as well as aggregate our research in order to find relevant information about assistive technologies and accessibility resources.

We will be working from several files, sorted by category, as well as a Google Sheets document that has several tabs to organize our data.

We will name files based on content. All files will be accompanied by a description of their content at the top of any document or file we produce.

 

3. What steps will you take to protect your or your participant’s security, privacy/confidentiality, intellectual property, or other rights? (Check current university policies for requirements.)

 

We will be protecting our participant’s security, privacy, and other rights by anonymizing data collected about them, using fabricated, fictitious names if and when they are referenced.

We will be collecting data on whether or not the Sounds of Music pilot program enriches and enhances the lives of those we are reaching out to, and will be refraining from collecting more than the most general and cursory of information about their personal lives, such as their age.

 

4. If you allow others to reuse your data, how will the data be accessed and shared?

 

Our data will be shared on a public-facing, freely available website run via WordPress on the CUNY Commons. It will also be made available in PDF format from May 2022 onwards.

We hope to reach schools, daycares, nursing homes, permanent care facilities, rehabilitation facilities, prisons, hospitals, and other public and private institutions. It is our fondest hope that our Sounds of Music workshop will facilitate the creation of a host of musical enrichment experiences for diverse audiences. We hope that this data can be used and updated in the near or further future.

Any Internet-connected device with a web browser should be able to access our data.

 

5. How will the data be archived for preservation and long-term access?

 

We plan to keep the data accessible indefinitely, or so long as it remains relevant.

We have discussed the longevity of our data, and have decided that we will entrust data management to a partner institution or university. We are still in search of said partner.

We shall be converting our raw data to .csv files, as well as two PDF versions – one in a standard font, another for the visually impaired.

The Plan: 9 Weeks

Phase 1 (March)

Part A: February 27 – March 12 (Week 1-2)

• Outreach and Publicity: Consult with Digital Fellows and others before creating a social media plan.
  • Assign: Connie & Kai
  • Deadline(s): March 5
• Create Data Management Plan
  • Assign: Kai
  • Deadline(s): March 3

Part B: March 13 – March 26 (Week 3-4)

• Design: Create a visual brand and logo for social media pages
  • Assign: Connie
  • Deadline(s): March 16 (Zoom Presentation)
• Create Information Architecture for Website Draft
  • Assig: Kai
  • Deadline(s): March 17th

Continue reading →