Friday, February 27, 2015

Making Ground on a Prospective Project in the Digital Humanities

A couple of months back I posted a blog entry in which I started to map out a prospective project in the digital humanities regarding issues of language, literacy, and culture and their intersections with Cuban digital practices and uneven access to technologies in Cuba. At the time I used Trevor Owens' blog on where to start on research questions in the digital humanities, particularly his emphasis on Joe Maxwell's ideas about the interactive components of research design. In this blog entry I will once again use the five distinct moves/stages/elements that Maxwell articulates in his approach, which includes:

1) goals, which clarifies the purpose for doing research;
2) conceptual framework, which refers to the specific literature(s), field(s), and experience(s) one is drawing on;
3) research questions, which clearly disseminates the statement(s) and question(s) one is working with in their project;
4) methods, which provides insight into the ways in which one will address and/or answer the aforementioned statement(s) and question(s); and
5) validity concerns, which address the limitations and biases that might inform one's approach to the project.

Below you will find my revised responses to Maxwell's five distinct moves/stages/elements, responses that are further informed by the readings I have engaged with regarding the digital humanities and my independent research on my specific topic. My hope is that my work in this blog entry reflects my willingness to adopt and practice Owens' iterative approach to bringing personalized projects in the digital humanities to fruition within the context of a sustained and thorough process.

1) Goals:

I still remain committed to carving out spaces in which to discuss Cuban digital practices, but I have also become very interested in how my project might provide unique opportunities to collaborate across Cuban populations, be they from Cuba, the United States, Puerto Rico, Spain, or otherwise. In considering BOTH end users as well as coders, programmers, and other collaborators I would very much like for my project to somehow represent not only Cuban digital practices in terms of citizens of and in Cuba but also those Cubans residing outside of Cuba. My hope is to illustrate the ways in which the major Cuban diasporas that took place in the wake of the Cuban Revolution have marked and had an impact on digital practices for ALL Cubans. In this sense, matters of identity, geopolitics, surveillance, paranoia, kinship, etc. will play a prominent role in the shape that my project will eventually take. Ultimately, though, this requires deeper consideration of what or who qualifies as a collaborator and what or who qualifies as the subject for content. Which is to say I have become more and more uncomfortable about directing the Western and "diasporic" gaze at the Cuban population in Cuba.

2) Conceptual Framework:

As you will see, I have expanded the scope of my research considerably. This will be a rather long list of prospective sources I might use to form the conceptual framework for my project and it will surely become even more robust as time goes on. That being said, I will do my best to rein myself in and be careful about the sources I decide to give precedence. What follows is the list of prospective sources that I am considering:

1) Banks, Adam J. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground.
2) Coté, John. “Cubans Log On behind Castro’s Back.”
3) Edwards, Charlie. “The Digital Humanities and Its Users”
4) Hernandez-Reguant, Ariana. “Radio Taino and the Cuban Quest for Identi . . . que?”
5) Hoffman, Bert. The Politics of the Internet in Third World Development: Challenges in Contrasting Regimes, with Case Studies with Costa Rica and Cuba.
6) Junqueira, Eduardo S., and Marcelo E. K. Buzato. New Literacies, New Agencies?: A Brazilian Persepctive on Mindsets, Digital Practices and Tools for Social Action in and Out of School.
7) Liu, Alan. “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”
8) McPherson, Tara. “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation.”
9) Pedrazza, Silvia. Political Disaff ection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus.
10) Press, Larry. “Cuba, Communism, and Computing.”
11) Press, Larry and Joel Snyder. “A Look at Cuban Networks.”
12) Rubira, Rainer, and Gisela Gil-Egui. "Political Communication in the Cuban Blogosphere: A Case Study of Generation Y."
13) Valdés, Nelson P. and Mario A. Rivera, “The Political Economy of the Internet in Cuba.”
14) Vazquez, Naghim. “Cuba in the Window of the Internet.”
15) Venegas, Cristina. Digital Dilemmas The State, the Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba
16) Vicari, Stefania. Blogging politics in Cuba: the framing of political discourse in the Cuban blogosphere
17) Voeux, Claire, and Julien Pain. “Going Online in Cuba: Internet under Surveillance.”

3) Research Questions:

1) To what extent have various populations and demographics in Cuba had material access to digital technologies over past decade or so?
2) In what capacity are Cuban citizens introduced to and/or given free reign to use digital technologies?
3) How do those engaging with various interfaces and digital technologies in Cuba compare to other "Western" societies, whether "democratic," "communist," or otherwise?
4) How have the major Cuban diasporas that have taken place since the Cuban Revolution helped shape communicative, digital, and rhetorical practices for Cubans within and outside of Cuba?
5) How might Cubans within and outside of Cuba create safe and collaborative spaces in which the "gaze" and focus is better distributed, transforming collaborator into subject for content, and vice versa?

4) Methods:

This project will certainly require that quite a bit of qualitative research actually take place within and outside of Cuba. However, I would first like to review more of the literature on issues of access to technology and digital literacy as they pertain to all Cubans to get a better sense of the social and critical landscape I am working in. It would also be helpful to get more information about the sorts of projects that academics throughout the world might be conducting in and around Cuba as of now. The Cuban government does grant "educational" visas, so it will be important to see where my project might fall in the miasma of research being conducted in and around various Cuban populations. It will be imperative that I engage with sources that are in both English and Spanish, and that I cast a rather wide net in terms of collaboration across contexts and Cuban populations.

5) Validity Concerns:

As much of the substance of this project will likely emerge in the context of qualitative research, there is certainly potential for my findings to be both limited as well as biased. I am generally working off of the presumption that digital literacies and digital practices in Cuba are fundamentally different and unique, so it will be important for me to rein myself in and not project these notions onto my findings. In line with this idea that digital literacies and digital practices in Cuba are different and unique, I must also be cautious and suspicious about the terms, vocabularies, and assumptions that I use and make as I articulate my findings. I believe that expanding my project to include Cuban populations (in the plural) whether residing inside or outside of Cuba will certainly help to temper some of the limitations and biases of my project. Ultimately, I will have to think a bit more about what this will look like and how I will be able to collaborate with others to make the project work and be both fruitful and accessible for most if not all Cuban populations inside and outside of Cuba.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Pass the Hammer

As I continue to develop the theoretical and conceptual framework for my project in the digital humanities, it is imperative that I consider in more detail the sorts of tools that might aid me in: 1) actually doing my project; and 2) presenting data or information to users. My particular project involves carving out unique spaces in which to represent and tenuously define the intersection between identity politics and Cuban digital practices, so it has particular linguistic and cultural demands that must be attended to before making a resource available to a larger audience. In searching for tools on the DIRT Directory Web site for digital research tools to help facilitate what I am attempting to accomplish in my project, I targeted tools that could be used in multiple platforms; supported multilingual users; had minimal system requirements; contained little (or no) overhead costs; and offered dedicated spaces in which  users and project developers might collaborate to help develop and edit content included in the project. In this blog entry, I will focus on two digital research tools that I feel might push my project forward in ways I have yet to consider up to this point: Wink and FromThePage.

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software with a rather simple and user-friendly interface and design structure. In keeping end-users in and around Cuban populations within and outside of Cuba at the forefront of my considerations, I feel that Wink will serve as a useful tool for my project in its capacity to help project developers create and maintain tutorials that will allow users to understand and navigate the platform that will host the content of the project as well as the content itself. In terms of its limitations, I feel that it would be even more useful if I could find a single tool that caters to individuals with severe physical and/or sensory impairments. I will also have to consider how I might organize and where I might locate these tutorials within the project so as not to obscure the content itself. Language, literacy, and culture serve as integral lenses through which to develop, evaluate, and deliver content to users. The prospect of integrating this tool into my project might go a rather long way in constructing the terms and resources for all users--regardless of their relative languages, literacies, and cultural capital--to understand and engage with the content included in my project.

FromThePage is a piece of software that allows users to transcribe handwritten documents online. It allows users to collaborate in discussing difficult writing or obscure words within the document itself. With issues of design and accessibility at stake for prospective users, I feel that FromThePage might go a long way in helping project developers as well as users across various linguistic, geographic, and cultural divides to collaborate with one another in transcribing and transliterating documents, artifacts, and conversations to speak more directly to their own particular contexts and perspectives. Using the software itself requires that those using the software are multilingual, though I wouldn't say that this is a considerable drawback. I would, however, like to find a more inclusive software that also provides options for visual and oral media. The goal of my project is to offer spaces in which to further discuss and define Cuban digital practices, so I see a lot of value in this sort of crowdsourcing within the context of project development as well as user interactivity.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Texty Texty

In this blog entry, I would like to respond to Jeffrey T. Schnapp's "Crowds," a research project in the digital humanities that was included in Volume 2 Issue 1 of Vectors Journal, a Special Issue on "Ephemera." In first navigating to "Crowds," I was really grateful for the statements by the author and the designer. While it's always good policy in projects of this magnitude to acknowledge your collaborators (and Schnapp does just that with the Project Credits page), it was interesting to get some insight from the designers themselves about their general perspective and design choices in "Crowds."

As I opened the project, I really liked the incorporation of sound to the project with the squabble of overlapping voices. It offered a nice aural representation of the project's subject, crowds, and it set a precedent for matching subject with other sensory data throughout the project. Sadly, that wasn't necessarily the case. While the images and videos from the various galleries were embedded and presented in very creative and interesting ways, perhaps I was expecting a bit more insofar as extending these galleries to the idea of "crowds" in more creative (or meaningful?) ways. I might be a bit too harsh or demanding in that critique, though, because I was sincerely blown away with the breadth and comprehensiveness of the project as a whole.

The pages for Crowd Theorists and Semantic Histories offer insight into the conceptual framework that informs Schnapp's approach to "Crowds." It was certainly important to complement the case studies from the Galleries page with this theoretical backdrop, but I did feel a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of theorists and histories included in these pages. In approaching a subject as robust and fraught with meaning(s), I see all sorts of value in both gaining and demonstrating an understanding of the conversations surrounding the subject in question, but I may have liked for the overwhelming amount of text from these theorists and histories to be supplemented by and with a section that attempted to synthesize this information and/or connect the dots, so to speak. Which is not to say that I wasn't grateful for how comprehensive all of these entries actually were, but I would've really liked to have understood the selection process Schnapp engaged in as well as the correlations he saw or made in putting all of these entries into conversation. While Schnapp does some of this in his Author's Statement, I felt that each of the components of his projects might have benefited from this sort of synthesis.

The Testimonies page itself also provides more personalized and context-specific lenses into various crowd movements. This was a welcoming and vital component of his project and it offered a nice complement to the rest of "Crowds." That being said, I might have liked for this section to be less text-heavy and to perhaps be distinguished in a significant way from the other pages included in Schnapp's project. Honestly, I guess I would've liked to have seen more variation in the manner and media in which text and information was presented. In my mind, this would've lent a great deal more personality and depth to Schnapp's project.

In terms of what I took from Schnapp's approach to "Crowds" and how I might apply it to my own work, I would really like to keep the following in mind:

1) Give voice(s) to collaborators AND subjects: As I said before, I really appreciated the fact that Schnapp gave the designers space in which to articulate their general perspective and design choices in "Spaces." I would like to extend that gesture as much to my own collaborators as my own subjects, as I found myself kind of discouraged by the seeming lack of personality in the Testimonies page as compared to the entries in the pages for Crowd Theorists and Semantic Histories.

2) Find creative ways to match the presentation of content with the subject itself: I'd really like to do some interesting things with the digital tools I am using to create my project, things that might help crystallize and complement what I've already researched and organized into contained components for my particular project.

3) Employ different manners and media in presenting text and information: As collaborators, subjects, and end-users are incredibly important to me in terms of how I organize content into my particular project, I would really like for the media I use to introduce and expand upon content to be as varied and context-specific as possible. Simply put, I don't want to make these rhetorical and design choices unilaterally, so I will try to make it a point to draw on my collaborators, subjects, and prospective end-users in making these decisions and/or have different media be featured for the same content. This might perhaps sound insane on the surface, but it's something I will place a lot of stock as I shift towards becoming more of a practitioner in the digital humanities.

Friday, February 6, 2015

DTC Presentation (Post-Peer Review Thoughts)

So, generally speaking, my DTC Presentation was pretty well received by Lucy and Lacy during our peer review session. Both of them applauded my ability to transition between concepts and slides and they appreciated the ways in which I represented all of the ideas in my presentation visually. I had expressed to them that I was interested in adding a "Hacktivism" slide, but I was struggling to find something that worked for me in Pixton. They had recommended that the Hacktivism slide be more representative of my own conflicted identity and heritage in order to convey how difficult issues about Cuba are to discuss in any forum, considering how fractured the relationship is between many Cubans and their generally hyper-conservative Cuban-American counterparts. Lucy mentioned that the presentation seemed as if it was two separate conversations in the sense that I did not integrate my own project in the digital humanities until after I had discussed the definition and the stakes, so I will likely refer more directly to concrete examples within my particular project throughout my presentation. This will help flesh out what is at stake while giving my audience a sense of the discursive terrain I intend to work in, in the future. I will also place more of an emphasis on the question of the end-user in Cuba, discussing how the design of my particular project will not be a one-to-one translation from Spanish to English and vice versa, but wildly different design schemes that speak more directly to the literacies that emerge from different cultural and geopolitical contexts. Lastly, I will be much clearer in my mapping out the manner in which my conceptualizations of the digital humanities present unique theoretical and methodological implications for my particular project on digital practices unique to the Cuban context.

DTC Conversation