Mainframes Project Update – 2022-03-31

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?

Sounds of Music Group Project Update March 31st, 2022

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 31st, 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 25th, 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.

Connie Cordon Personal Blog 03/29

So far this week I’ve created an Instagram, Twitter, and completed the CSV. I am not ready to release the twitter and instagram until I’ve gathered enough content for people to view, and also coordinate with Kai about posting to social media.

I also emailed Jenna Freedman, curator of the Barnard Zine Library and Librarian for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, about potentially printing a zine at Barnard if they had the resources to do so. Instead she redirected towards me The Graduate Centers own zine resources, which was very kind of her. I was also suggested to use Fireball Printing to have a zine created for me, or Blurb.com

I’ve also looked at some digital archives to serve as inspiration for how digital archives can work effectively and how there are so many different way to tell stories through layouts and digital photo exhibits.

Archive for clothing brand C.P. Company: https://archive.cpcompany.com/

Archive for Glass Spectrum; library of natural glazes created as a reference and learning resource for ceramicists, artists, and students: https://www.glazespectrum.com/

Archive for The Global Studio, a program run by the University of Technology Sydney’s Photography department. The page is an online exhibition and archive for the work created during the 2020 edition. http://globalstudio2020.utsphotography.com/http://globalstudio2020.utsphotography.com/

YouSayPotatoISayFuckYou by artist Clara Bahlsen: https://yousaypotatoisayfuckyou.com/

Group Project Update

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.

Modeling Value in the Anthropocene | Group Update – 3.24.22

Hi folks!

Last week, the Modeling Value in the Anthropocene: Contributions to a metacosmics project at last found itself amidst greener pastures after a series of necessary revisions to the project’s scope and a sequence of invaluable consultations with digital humanists who have helped to shine a light on realistic pathways for reaching our goals along with the resources and workshops needed to guide us along the way.

Through our conversations with members of the Graduate Center Digital Fellows and the University of South Carolina’s resident digital writing and computational analysis expert Micheal Gavin, Brian and I have been collaboratively working through Word Embedding tutorials, such as this practical introduction from Connor Gilroy at the University of Washington, and familiarizing ourselves with the learning algorithm we intend on using in the production of our vector representations, GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation. This step forward in the development of an answer to our project’s question comes as a result of our successful cleaning and preparation of the corpus. Though we underestimated the complex nature of this process, as well as the fundamental technical skills needed in order to make the necessary tweaks to our text, we’ve managed to extract that which will operate as a groundwork for all future experimentation and analysis. Over the course of the next week, Brian and I intend on diving into our project’s trial period of exploratory vector analysis through the early development of a locally trained word2vec model. As with all stages of our project thus far, this will come with a heavy dose of Python research and development and we will be continuing our frequent Zoom work sessions in order to collaboratively grow, fine-tune, and troubleshoot our model of value in the Anthropocene.

Also on the agenda for this coming week is the continued buildout of our website and the generation of a “press kit” to expedite our outreach objectives. As it’s currently drafted, our website exists largely as a stand-in awaiting our project’s findings but we intend on gradually developing it aesthetically as we progress through this second half of the semester. As for outreach, we are still deliberating over strategies of communication, especially regarding our method of engagement with the Stieglerian scholarly community, and will be providing updates in the weeks to come.

Lastly, Brian and I continue to work through Bernard Stiegler’s Nanjing Lectures as to develop and strengthen the theoretical framework through which we will be viewing our vector analysis. This research has expanded in scope for each of us, coming to include works such as Bifurcate: ‘There is No Alternative’ edited by Stiegler with the Internation Collective, Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics by Daniel Ross, and The Thought of Bernard Stiegler: Capitalism, Technology and the Politics of Spirit. Through continued research and interlocution in the coming weeks, Brian and I aim to perpetuate the Stiegler-centric frame of thought we’ve pathologically maintained thus far and commence developing our final product in conjunction with that which is discoverable and visualized through our word2vec analysis.

That’s all for now – we’re looking forward to seeing what everyone else has been up to!

H&B

Sounds of Music Group Project Update 3/24

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)

Kai – Personal Blog 3/23

As Connie mentioned in her blog post this week, we started building the website for our archive. For me, it’s typically nerve-racking to start to show work in process. This is especially true on a subject that I find fascinating and worthy of exploration for beyond the end product due for this class. After hearing some conflicting ideas about how to proceed given the fact that we felt uncertain about the usefulness of our research and archival collection, we both agreed that trying to build something sooner might give us insight into the state of our research thus far.  One method of overcome hesitation to build/publish on my part was to channel the inner technical project/program manager bag of tricks I’ve collected with my professional experience over the last ten years.

The most influential software development practices theory over the last three decades are found under the Agile Development umbrella. As such, I found some strength to start building out the website for our archive in the  Manifesto for Agile Software Development. One value statement from that concise document I’ve always held close to me while working with software engineers is “working software over comprehensive documentation.” The principal behind this software cardinal virtue elaborated in the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto:
“working software is the primary measure of progress.” One important caveat to the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto, each of which is formulated with the favored value in the left, and the diminished value on the right, is that “while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.” One can assert that planning and documentation play a role in the development of a digital project in the context of digital humanities. Certainly it’s true when it comes to acquiring funding for a digital initiative. Still, a plan and documentation pale somewhat to having the digital project manifest itself, in this case, as a website. Consequently, I used the agile rationale to dive head first into creating a repo and generating some version of our archive on the web using Wax.

Another source of inspiration came in the form of software engineering management wisdom gleaned from the development of IBMs OS/360, the operation system developed for the company’s System/360 mainframe. Fred Brook’s The Mythical Man-Month details the learning he culled from his experience managing the OS/360, germinating from a question IBM’s CEO asked Brooks during his exit interview on why managing a software project seemed significantly difficult in comparison to a hardware project. While the book is clearly from a particular time and place in history, some of the lessons learned feel durable even in the face of increased processing power and more ergonomic/productive programming technologies. One chapter, “Plan to Throw One Away” felt appropriate to address any hesitation I might feel in starting our web archive as soon as possible. As Brooks sees it:

In most projects, the first system built is barely usable.There is no alternative but to start again, smarting but smarter, and build a redesigned version in which…problems are solved…one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not omniscient as to get it right the first time. The management question, there, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers…Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow (Brooks, 116).

In an attempt to embrace this lesson, we’ve started to assemble our metadata in the csv without overthinking it, and knowing that we won’t get the filters and categorizations right the first time, but that in doing the work will yield the lessons for a reversion. Similarly, we’re dumping our entire photo catalog into the website as a first step. While some curation has already taken plan in the creation of our collection, we need to see all of the assets in one place to understand if any of them won’t work for our archive for one reason or another. I’ve also embraced the throwaway nature of some of the initial work in the naming conventions in our code: the collection at present is called temp_collection and we reuse templates from the Wax demo project as a starting off point. Even the repo name is wax-project, obviously is nondescript name. The key motivation is to get something working, even if we’ll eventually replace a great deal of it. Once we have a website up and running, we can critique it, file bugs and changes requests to it, and create a new version that better addresses our needs.

Citations

Brooks, Frederick Phillips. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley, 1995.

Connie – Personal Blog 03/22

This week we’re starting on the website, which in process started with creating an information architecture, and now a CSV. I noticed for Outdoor Recreation Archive they have an inventory spreadsheet.

On another note, something unplanned occurred while I was doing research about the exhibit “Computer Films of the 1960s” the Museum of Moving History held. I noticed on their website there was a screening called “As Mine Exactly“, held by Charlie Shackleton. There was a small description of the event, but it looked like some kind of desktop documentary from what I could tell.

As Mine Exactly

I signed up for this viewing under the assumption it would be in a theatre playing a desktop documentary, but instead, upon arrival on Friday, I was placed in a room with Charlie himself while I wore a VR headset. The headset played the desktop documentary while Charlie narrated himself in the room. The recorded phrases from his mother played from a speaker behind my head. It was a unique and interesting form of storytelling, as it was an intimate moment with someone else, but with a piece of machinery in between us. It felt personal, and yet I knew it wasn’t, because he had done this performance about 60 times with different people.

In the VR headset, it was a desktop screen that showed photos of his mother, scans of journal pages documenting her seizures, and video recordings of her seizures taken by him to show to the doctor treating her.

In my last blog post I ruminated over the idea of technology simultaneously aiding and destroying our existence. However after this experience, it also reminded me of how one can use computers in such a way to create intimate moments with another, and also use it as a tool to process trauma.

Before it was an artistic project, I talked to a friend about having been a child, having observed my mom’s seizures, and ultimately having filmed a number of them for medical observation. This friend instantly made the connection between that and me being a documentary filmmaker. My initial reaction was, “No, absolutely not. It’s too sensitive to me and it’s too personal.

Once I started interrogating that thought, I realized that I found the idea that I could take this incredibly intimate material and release it into a content ecosystem in which it can be consumed in any number of ways, with any amount of engagement, empathy or a lack thereof, off-putting. For much of the work I’ve made, that’s exactly the kind of unpredictable lack of control I want for its artistic possibilities. With As Mine Exactly, it felt irresponsible, both to me and my mom and also to a viewer, to put something sensitive out into the world with no assurance that it would be received in an ethical way.

Charlie Shackleton interview “Strengthening Bonds”

Mainframes Project Update – 2022-03-22

Project update 2022-03-22

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.

Digital Gardens Update: Website and More!

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.