* Just now realizing I had misplaced my week 2 post in the Commons Forum *

Looking at Torn Apart/ Separados:

One of the maps affects with regard to shinning a light on recipients of ICE money is to present an identifiable network with data which, though public, remains obscured by the separation of its many individual nodes. Developing an understanding of what a practical application of DH is about around the work presented by this site would position DH as a method of asserting a right to the information commons and using that public “space” as a lever of power. What’s more, the diversity of methodologies required for this sort of project presents DH as practice akin to spatial tactics and coalition building between otherwise separate social justice movements, methods which have grown in popularity and efficacy in the 21st century. In both fields, this signals a recognition of the necessity of developing stronger new tactics for unmet goals and ways of tapping into the power of individuals who reproduce culture from the ground up.

Developing an understanding of what DH is about on a theoretical level, around this project and site which reflects on its team as “scholars of space, race, gender, and the digital,”  falls in line with Patrik Svensson’s comments in the 2012 Debates in the Digital Humanities about DH as a “trading zone” for tackling difficult data methodologies. Also in line with Svenssons comments, in this instance regarding the facilitation of “deep integration between thinking and making,” the team behind Torn Apart/ Separados expresses their working assumptions as the “knowledge that data is imprecise, impure, and as much a tool for incarceration and control as it is for revealing the truth.”

Digital Humanities can be defined as many different things depending on the point-of-view that one is taking. This can be the case for many fields as well. As shown in the different introductions for the Debates in Digital Humanities books, there is a clear shift in the view of the field from conception, to understanding, to application. With how our world is now, when applying the use of DH, it is allowing for a new understanding of what is occurring in our world on a more global scale.

While looking at the “Torn Apart / Separados” site, the culmination of data from different sources, represented in different ways, opens the world of immigration in a way that cannot be explained through other mediums. It is easy to read or see about what is happening to families in certain areas through new outlets and social media and to believe that there is one agency (ICE) responsible for the separation of families, but it is another thing to see other factors that are involved with helping this agency to be able to do what they do. How many companies do you shop at that help support ICE? There are times when the events you hear about on the news, though relevant, seem to be disconnected from your own world that there is no affect that the story has on you directly. This site, however, breaks down those walls and shows how far the connections spread. In addition to the connections between ICE and other companies/individuals, the website brings to light the amount of people that have been deported by ICE as opposed to the ones that make it to social media.

As I had mentioned in a previous comment, this site reminded me of another site that I was exposed to in the Technology, Learning and Development course through the Psychology and Education department at The Graduate Center, CUNY. The site recreates the interview process for asylum seekers, where the user (you) are the interviewer.

The Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) decides which asylum seekers may stay in the country. Civil servants conduct an in-depth interview with the alleged refugee. This detailed interview is of great importance. Which of these applicants would you give asylum to? Observe, listen, and decide.

Het Nader Gehoor

The user is shown videos of asylum seekers (actor portrayals of true stories) answering questions that the user “asks” using tags created from the testimony. After some time, the user is asked if the asylum seeker is eligible based on their story and the requirements for granting asylum. No matter the story, if the asylum seeker is not “qualified” based on the law, they will be denied. Seeing the stories represented in this way brings the system to life for those of us who are not aware of the process.

In connection to our discussion today, DH can take many forms. One of them that was discussed and questioned today was videos. I had mentioned a project called LearningSites, Inc. I came across this project 4 years ago at a lecture at The National Arts Club in NYC. It was a trip organized by my Intro to Archaeology professor that ended up leading me to the DH program. During the lecture, the speaker was showcasing this project that allowed the user to “walk” through a virtual landscape of an archaeological site as it would have looked when it was in use. Without being at the site (or being alive thousands of years ago) you could get a first-person view and sense of what the site would have looked like.

Everything was based on archaeological data, right down to the oil used in the lamps. This was the point that stuck with me after all these years. The oil had to be coded in a specific way to represent the fact that different oils emit specific light (and thus could interfere with the way the paintings on the walls looked), and based on the types of trade that the site had or the local oils they may have had access to.

Within a few weeks after this lecture, the site that was being showcased (Nimrud), was destroyed by ISIS. Not only was the program valuable in terms of education, but it then became a time capsule for data that was no longer tangible.

For the past 4 years I had been hoping that the project would release the program that they used during the lecture but I did not see any updates to the project until this past weekend. Though they cannot provide the actual program on the website for the Nimrud site (as far as I’ve seen), they posted a video on YouTube (which I will link below) that shows a “walk”through of what the project is like for the site of Nimrud.

DH projects like this not only preserves data that can no longer be looked at, it also puts it into a new perspective different from those that are presented through scholarship or through a museum. This includes, though is most certainly not limited to, the fact that most ancient sculptures and friezes were painted in color. Now that the color has all faded, we are left with half of the picture. Programs like this can fill in the gaps.

The visualized layout of Torn Apart struck me as a salient instance in which DH practices work to graphically negotiate the buried narratives of recent diasporas, while also resisting the urge to classify its scholarly approach under an explicit theoretical framework. This sort of praxis seems to echo how David Scott invites his readers to “think Caribbean studies” by means of persistent inquiry, without necessarily expecting a categorical “answer” on the other end of such questioning. “The point (political, conceptual, disciplinary, moral of mobilizing this image,” or questioning, as Scott claims, seems more contingent upon the unraveling effect that investigative thinking can have on a postcolonial field of inquiry like Caribbean studies. To that point, visualizations such as Torn Apart, I believe, typify scholarship as process: they resist any clear-cut theoretical language, often defined by “foreign” powers; and instead illustrate data in such a way as to encourage its audience to construct their own critical narrative about how, at least in this case, current American power structures like ICE (and their moneyed interests) work to subjugate underrepresented migratory groups. I think the potential for constructing these narratives may lie, for instance, in the nexus between two or more separate data points, as in the case of donors from seemingly distinct political domains. But ultimately there is immeasurable room of critical inquiry amid an accessible dataset like Torn Apart, which is most certainly a virtue when it comes to unraveling the veiled workings of political hegemony in this day and time. 

As a librarian working in special collections and a relative newcomer to the digital humanities field, I really enjoyed this week’s readings and posted sites. I think it took looking through the sites, in particular, the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) to understand what the field of digital humanities is and how I can approach projects not only as a librarian/archivist but as a digital humanist.

A simple definition of the traditional role of an archivist is one who acquires a collection, processes it with respect to ‘original order,’ and provides access to the public (usually through finding aids). In recent years, archivists have taken a more active role by collaborating with scholars across the disciplines to digitally “re-archive” (ECDA) existing collections and reassemble them to highlight alternate views of history from often underrepresented subjects/groups. The ECDA calls it “decolonizing the archive.”

An example of decolonizing the archive is in the ECDA’s Embedded Slave Narrative Collection. The team took works that were created by the European colonials in power and examined the text to find stories from the slaves themselves. These stories were extracted and authorial credit given to the slaves, like in “Clara’s Narrative.” While the team kept Bryan Edwards as an author for his work History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793), they also assigned Clara as an author for her narrative that appears in Edwards’ book. This digital archive has essentially given Clara and many of the slaves and indigenous people of the Caribbean a voice in the archive and Caribbean history.

The concept of decolonizing the traditional archive is such an interesting way for archivists to get involved in digital humanities projects. I don’t think this is something we could/should do by ourselves, so collaboration is key. While we believe that the original collection is of value and should be preserved, we understand that it may not create an authentic account of what happened. Therefore, we should be looking at what critical voices and experiences are missing and partner with digital humanists to recover those once silenced voices for a new digital archive.

(I apologize in advanced for what turned out to be a very long reflection!)

The theme that repeated itself among our resources this week was the relationship between DH and story. I would further unpack story to include truth and agenda. From an information literacy perspective I often think about the following questions (not in order of importance):

“What agenda is influencing story and truth?”
“Whose story is considered the truth?” 
“How do we recognize the truth?”

On the most universal level stories and truth are curated, and there is great power in curation. Throughout history we’ve witnessed colonizing powers curate the stories we’ve come to believe as true, without mention of agenda. For example, David Scott refers to the question of agenda in On the Question of Caribbean Studies when he asks, “What is the point (political, conceptual, disciplinary, moral) of mobilizing this particular image, rather than some other, of the Caribbean in these particular discourses?” He goes on to reflect, “The ‘dependent’ character of the existing literature ‘reflects the fact that hitherto most of the researches in this area have been conducted by visiting social scientists from the United States or Britain, and have been guided by theories and themes of interest developed in studies of societies and cultures outside the British Caribbean.’” 

Even with the best intentions scholars and librarians categorize and archive materials with their own language, which may curate the community out of its own story. In Introduction: The Digital Black Atlantic Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam include two essays about practices of neglect that ultimately shape the story of the Caribbean. In “Dividing the World for Library Collection Development” the authors “wrestle with the need to free Caribbean sources from sedimented library practices of categorization while keeping them detectable within the new worlds of access offered by digital technologies.” In “A Paper Archive Sojourner’s Notes to Black Digital Humanities,” the author, Nadine Chambers, “queries the digital sedimentation of human error and neglect in archives of the black Atlantic.” Even unintentionally we sow the seeds of incorrect stories, and those stories have a lasting impact on the world outside of the academy.

The Digital Humanities grant us the opportunity to use data and narrative to question the stories we take for granted, or know little about, and to create new stories in multimodal formats. This is a great plus for access. Story has the power to mobilize, and I am excited that the “definition” and scope of Digital Humanities in 2019 includes resistance. In  their chapter “A DH that Matters” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, Matt and Lauren state:

“We are convinced that digital humanists can contribute significantly to a larger technically and historically informed resistance. By enabling communication across communities and networks, by creating platforms that amplify the voices of those most in need of being heard, by pursuing projects that perform the work of recovery and resistance, and by undertaking research that intervenes in the areas of data surveillance and privacy.”

Torn Apart / Separados is a powerful, participatory DH project that can be used for resistance and mobilization. It gives urgency to the stories of the humanitarian crisis of asylum seekers to a much wider audience than academia. It allows the public to ask new questions about curated information, and to tell comprehensive, true stories that we definitely do not get in the news media if consumed on an article by article basis. Even though this project also has a social and political agenda, I really appreciate the efforts the team has taken to make their work transparent, open, and arguably inclusive. The project team makes a point to note that the visualizations and data are just one part of a larger story, and the site as a whole contextualizes reflections on the data from the team itself, as well as historians, activists, artists, and writers who provide their own readings of the visual stories. That said, even this team, like the authors included in Introduction: The Digital Black Atlantic acknowledge that with best intention data is “imprecise, impure, and as much a tool for incarceration and control as it is revealing the truth.” They make it possible to investigate their work, because the site includes a fantastic bibliography with links to a full Zotero resource, an open syllabus on immigration, and nearly all of their data in an open repository in GitHub. They include data sources, and their visualization tools in the credits portion of the site. 

Not only is the data and visualization component transparent, but I also appreciate all of the background information on the contributors. For example, author bios link to personal websites and Twitter accounts, as well as other publications from said authors to see the landscape of their portfolio / with whom they affiliate. For example, I love that Gaiutra Bahadur writes about memory maps and story maps to give a humanistic story about immigration in addition to geodata.

I also thought about social aspect of DH, and decided to look at the hashtags about this project on Twitter to see how the public is engaging with it. A quick review illustrated that the story about the project has been shared by WIRED, DH contributors across the globe, NPR Latino USA, Library Journal, and researchers in many disciplines. One wonderful use of Twitter from a contributor, Manan Ahmed links a Trump tweet including a non-truth to a section of #TornApart v2. 

There is so much potential for this project and others to influence open pedagogy, and the stories we learn in classrooms. I intend to share this with the OER community, which is always looking for new and relevant teaching materials. I wonder how else this has been circulated in the education community?

On a final note, this project put action in perspective for me as an individual. I often feel powerless around issues like immigration, as I am not near the border. But seeing V2 of this project illustrated that there is a very local way to engage. In fact, my local representative received $19M ICE dollars since 2014. This will definitely be a visual story that I will use when she’s up for reelection!

The readings this week were helpful to me, as someone who has a vague (but passionate) sense of what DH truly is, in identifying possible practical applications of DH. The readings were a genuine and welcome introduction into the foundation and history of DH’s emergence.

However, what I found most interesting, as someone whose scholarship has thus far been focused on post-colonial theory and literature (specifically post-colonial African & Caribbean Lit), was The Early Caribbean Digital Archive website. Specifically, the section on Decolonizing the Archive. It brought to mind a question on DH as social justice. A digital archive becomes a question of accessibility. Traditionally, academia (and the humanities most frequently) has relied on physical representations of knowledge – texts in libraries and archives, documents that live in basements and temperature controlled rooms in libraries. These aren’t necessarily accessible spaces, especially for groups that are scarred by colonization.

The digital archive then, offers an opportunity to bypass traditional academic and intellectual gate-keeping by sharing, collaborating, and as the site points out, the chance to “disrupt, review, question, and revise the colonial knowledge regime that informs the archives from which we draw most of our materials” – this is a fascinating concept to me. Digital tools can certainly be limiting in some ways, but the idea that decolonization can take place through a digital archive, is the sort of thing that makes me reframe my initial ideas of what DH is.

Archiving – digital or otherwise – aren’t my specific area of interest, but this creates a clear connection for me between humanist study and digital tools, one that isn’t “mapping” (which I have little frame of reference for and struggle to conceptualize beyond a literal mind image of a google map with photos strewn about it).

DH as a decolonization tool is very appealing and also brings the semesters topic more into focus for me.

Caribbean Digital represents the constant re-examining that the discipline of digital humanities seems to put itself through. By discussing the advantages and limitations of the field, digital humanists focused on Caribbean studies came together to improve their approach to pedagogy, activism, and archival practice. By attempting this integration/disintegration, DH creates more than the sum of its parts, harnessing juxtaposition, just as is suggested in the Introduction to the Digital Black Atlantic.  

The Early Caribbean Digital Archives gives a multiplicity of voice to Caribbean studies by providing users with access to primary sources which detail the lives of slaves and other subjects of colonialism. The expansion of dialogue is a mainstay of digital humanities, as discussed in The Digital Humanities Moment.

One of Create Caribbean’s focuses is the fostering of a community at Dominica State College and beyond. It’s the beyond that links it so tightly with what we think of as the possibilities of digital humanities. This project also focuses on the “building” aspect of digital humanities—collaboration on projects ranging from archives for local politics to the digital mapping of these localities.

Because I work in politics, the site most interesting to me was Torn Apart / Separados. This site uses visualizations to display and make sense of an immense amount of data, more data than we are used to looking at. Often when the public pressures the government to be more transparent, agencies will dump data onto websites in formats not easily discernable by laypeople. A strength of this project is its ability to create a narrative using a vast amount of data, and the narrative it creates undermines prominent political rhetoric—especially that of the Democratic Party. We know the situation at the border is bad, we know the Democrats “oppose” it, but we also know how money works in politics, often pulling away the rhetorical differences of the two parties and leaving us without defense. What does it mean to be a sanctuary city if our local government is complicit in border camp profiteering? Let’s take a case study of 3 New York City congressional representatives.

New York 10^th District

ICE Money Received Since 2014

$2.3 Million

Democratic Rep Jerrold Nadler, in office since 1992

Biggest profiteer is The Corporate Source at $1.2 million

New York 7^th District

ICE Money Received Since 2014

$220K

Democratic Rep Nadya Velazquez, in office since 1993

Biggest profiteer is the City of New York at $110K

New York 8^th District

ICE Money Received Since 2014

$12 Million

Democratic Rep Hakeem Jeffries, in office since 2013

Biggest profiteer is Legal Interpreting Services at $12 million

First off, we must recognize that camps at the border are not a new thing. We had camps during Obama, Bush, and Clinton too. What has changed is the fact that families are being separated now for deterrent purposes. That is, the Trump administration is using this tactic as a way to stop people from coming over our borders. This brings us to a weak point of this project—the data set is not specific to the time in which this policy has been enacted. Opposition to these camps, which have existed for decades, and opposition to practices such as family separations are two distinct policy positions.

Though her district accepted the least money of the three, Rep Nadya Velazquez’s “biggest profiteer” is the most alarming—the City of New York. This is another strength of the project; it highlights in a captivating way the complicity and hypocrisy of our localities and governments. This site could be a valuable tool for organizers wishing to illustrate the vastness of the immigration issue; this chaos is not all caused by Trump, and it is certainly not single-handedly perpetuated by him. The realization that ICE and its camps operate through a vast web of transactions could allow people to hold their local governments and businesses more accountable.

If I were to center an understand of digital humanities around Torn Apart / Separados, I would define DH as a discipline capable of taking large data sets and creating a cogent narrative to influence the outcome of a discussion through a digital medium. Most reporting around family separation rely on affective motivators; writers want readers to feel the weight of the horrible situation. Their stories have told us what is happening; this project illustrates how it is happening. The discipline of DH is well suited to tackle systematic issues that are too big to see. Data is all around us. There is so much of it we are often at a loss. DH gives us the ability to communicate complex and interlocking factors in a visually decodable way. This opens up possibilities.  

Before taking this course, I was familiar with how DH has been defined in the past. The introductions I read from the 2012 and 2016 Debates in the Digital Humanities reflected my understanding of DH. The 2019 introduction, however, resonated with me. Digital humanists can come together by “enabling communication across communities and networks, by creating platforms that amplify the voices of those in need of being heard, [and] by pursuing projects that perform the work recovery and resistance.” The sites listed to explore this week follow the line of thinking outlined in this introduction.

I believe the project Torn Apart/Separados is an example of digital humanists contributing to an “informed resistance” mentioned in “Introduction: A DH That Matters.” By mapping and visualizing the financial web that supports and funds ICE, this project attempts to inform the public and bring attention to those affected by federal agency.  

Create Caribbean Projects serves to make knowledge free and accessible to all people. They also build and share digital tools that preserve Caribbean culture and heritage. This initiative is an example of DH creating scholarship of a community for its community. These project help boost voices and experiences not typically addressed. It also challenges the epistemology of the Global North as universal, an idea addressed in “Introduction: The Digital Black Atlantic.”

I think DH can create scholarship for, and give voice to, communities threatened by the reality of the world today. I believe DH can be defined as a field that uses a various areas of study and tools to tell complex stories. The two projects mentioned above are examples of this definition of DH in action. In this moment in time, it important to tell the stories of those silenced and the interdisciplinary nature of DH allows for a more expansive effort in telling these stories.