Digital Humanities

Tomorrow is the final day of “Building a Digital Portfolio,” and with it comes an opportunity for reflection. When I applied for the workshop, I carried several vaguely-defined projects in my head that sounded interesting, but I had no idea of how to pursue them. I attended Digital Humanities events on my campus with great enthusiasm, but wasn’t sure how to engage in meaningful conversations on the projects discussed.

At the end of the two weeks (and a lot of reading!), I feel confident about my working knowledge of the field and relevant vocabularies. As for my projects? It’s a somewhat more complicated story that is best explained by framing them as short, long-term, and intermittent projects.

Short Term: 

In previous posts, I discussed the possibility of creating a map related to a dissertation chapter, and evaluated different platforms that might be able to support the project. Earlier this week, our session dedicated to mapping platforms helped me to identify what exactly I need my map to do, and how it might function within my larger project. This, however, opened a pandora’s box of questions with regard to the role of this digital tool in my dissertation. I began to wonder if every other chapter needed a corresponding tool, and how to remain consistent without becoming redundant.

As these questions were mounting, we read Paige Morgan’s essay “How to Get a Digital Humanities Project Off the Ground,” which advises against deciding hastily to incorporate a digital component into your dissertation. As a result, I’ve tabled the plan to incorporate the map into the bound version of the dissertation. However, there is still value in creating the map, which consists of a modest number of data points, and can help me to prove the chapter’s overarching argument. When I return home, I plan to begin locating historic maps of Los Angeles that I can use to overlay the generic map that CartoDB offers so as to more accurately represent the changes to the landscape of Watts between 1965-1967.

Long Term:

The idea that compelled me to apply to the workshop initially is a desire to build a database of Los Angeles artworks sited in public spaces (that don’t necessarily fall into the categories of “public” art or “street” art). This is a monumental task, and could constitute a dissertation project in its own right.

I’ve determined to call the task of building this database my “second book project,” which is a catch-all term I generally use to describe everything I’m interested in that can’t fit in my dissertation. However, after hearing Michelle Greet discuss the Transatlantic Encounters database and how it evolved in relation to her second book project, such an undertaking seems quite possible. Although I can’t dedicate a year to building the database right now, I know that I can start collecting data while researching my dissertation, and possibly even build relationships with some of the arts organizations I am writing about that have coordinated relevant projects.

Intermittent:

In the midst of strategizing on the short and long-term, this year, I will be teaching two courses: a 70-student class on Chicana/o Art, and a 20-person course on U.S. Art and Visual Culture. In both of these classes, I plan to incorporate digital tools in various ways, and have begun reading about digital pedagogy.

For the Chicana/o Art class, I recently learned about El Museo Eduardo Carrillo, an online archive of works by an Eduardo Carrillo, an important Chicano artist who lived and worked in Santa Cruz and its related rotating exhibitions that features essays by key scholars in the field. In addition to creating an assignment that will invite my students to engage with these materials, I am also considering incorporating an image annotation assignment, as well as a “Wikipedia-editing” assignment that would be directed toward the lackluster “Chicano Art” entry after reading Adeline Koh’s piece featuring suggestions for introducing undergraduates to the digital humanities.

My U.S. Art and Visual Culture class initially planned to use Scalar as a platform for showcasing collaborative student projects, but am still considering what I want my students to take away from the course, and whether Scalar is the right platform for those objectives. Throughout both courses, however, I plan to blog about the process of introducing digital projects into my courses, so stay tuned!

All of this is to say that the workshop has left me with not only a new enthusiasm for my research and teaching, but the world of collaboration and conversation that exists within the digital humanities and digital art history. I not only feel as if I have found a community of scholars whose work resonates with my own, but that within this community, it is possible to contribute to the conversation in a variety of ways.

My project has been initially conceptualized as a map, and although we will be discussing mapping platforms next week, we have already come across several tools that can be used for this purpose. The simplest option is to insert items as markets onto a google map. However, the capability to embed media into this format seems somewhat limited, and it may be overly simplistic for the time period I would like to map to cover.

Another possibility is to upload an image of a map to a platform like thinglink, or perhaps even prezi. From there, the image could be annotated with comments and images that would indicate relevant historical change. The downside of this is that the map would be temporally static, and the map I selected would represent a specific historical moment, which may pose difficulties for showing the complexity of Watts’ spatial development over time.

Today, we experimented with Sketchup, which is a platform for creating spatial and architectural models. Sketchup has the capability to render an extraordinary level of detail. However, it shares the issue of temporal staticity of the mapping options above, and this time, I am unclear whether I be able to annotate the model.

However, modeling my project, at least initially, could offer some tangible benefits at the same time that it creates unique challenges. One advantage would be the intimate knowledge I would develop about the built environment of Watts during the 1960s that would allow me to better understand the experience of the neighborhood from both the planning and human scales.

The greatest challenge that I anticipate is selecting which moment to base the model on: would it be more advantageous to model Watts as it appeared prior to the uprising, immediately afterward, or approximately one year later? The first option may prove more difficult due to the potential lack of documentation, whereas modeling Watts in the immediate aftermath of the uprising would have extensive documentation to draw upon, allowing a comprehensive understanding of the types of structures that had been destroyed, along with its magnitude. However, I am concerned that this choice would appear to define Watts’ spatial relations as defined by absence and destruction if I can not also visualize the cultural spaces which were established in destroyed buildings during the following year. The third, and most appealing option so far, is to model Watts approximately one year later.

This inspires the question of how it might be possible to indicate destroyed or short-lived structures within these models. It appears that toying around with the options for textures and surfaces would allow for a semi-translucent exterior to be created that could indicate a structure that was no longer extant.

As a way of taking the longest route back to the starting point of this post, the need to choose between making models and creating a map can potentially be circumvented by screen capping the completed model, which could become the basis for a map that could then be annotated. There is most likely a more efficient way to combine the most desired qualities of these two platforms, neither of which were able to have the dynamic timeline I would like. However, what I have determined is that spending some time modeling Watts could be a valuable starting point.

After spending some time getting acquainted with Omeka and Scalar this afternoon, I’ve been thinking through how one might decide between the two platforms for a given project. A hunch that I have is that projects could use either platform, but that the ways that the interfaces operate will ultimately lead them to have distinct internal architectures, and similarly, will look differently, despite having similar content. After uploading a few test pages and items, it feels very much as if Omeka’s interface emphasizes individual items and options for their arrangement and display, whereas Scalar’s strength lies in the flexibility to create a context in which those same items may be related to each other in a variety of ways.

In terms the way my mind works, I feel most comfortable building a context and inserting things into it. However, in considering my mapping mini-project, it feels more intuitive to think of locations on the map as distinct items, which would indicate that an Omeka exhibition that uses the geolocation plugin would be one potential route for creating the map. I am reluctant to go “all in” however, in part because I dislike the aesthetic quality of google maps, and want to be able to do more than simply drop a few pins onto it. With regard to Scalar, it is still somewhat unclear what possibilities the interface might offer for this type of project.

Before developing my own project plan, it feels important to further articulate the unique attributes of each system and the form created by their unique interfaces. As a result, I’m thinking about building two sample projects in Scalar and Omeka using the same (small) data set as a way to further understand their nuances. Stay tuned!