Digital Scholarship Summer Research Fellows 2017

Month: June 2017 (Page 1 of 5)

Week 5

June 30, 2017 /

The past few weeks have shown me the importance of making deliberate decisions with convincing justifications. Given the amount of freedom we have to develop our research questions and final projects, the process of deciding the direction in which to take my work proved to be a challenging one. I wanted to focus on internet development in China, but this topic remains very broad and can be explored in several different ways. It is only after reading reports by CNNIC and various other articles that I decided to focus on the areas in which consumers in China feel the greatest impact and is most evident in people’s everyday lives.

The next step would then be to understand the different developments that have been rapidly growing in importance in China over the past few years. I have seen snapshots of these changes through my short visits back, and hence started my project off intending to focus on the ones that I saw the most of and felt the greatest presence – Alibaba, WeChat, Didi Dache, Dianping. However, as I continued researching and reading about the topic, I was introduced to the complexities of internet companies in China. It was a challenge understanding the connections between different companies and recognizing the scale of each company’s influence within the market. I soon realized that Alibaba and Tencent were far more significant than Didi DaChe and Dianping. Baidu, a search engine company which I never intended to touch upon, became difficult to ignore as it appeared on reports and articles time and again. After further research, I decided to focus on the ‘Big Three’ and hopefully briefly touch upon the other companies they are each investing in and competing against.

Working on the timeline for Alibaba forced me to really think about the focus and purpose of my project. The audience I am writing to is likely to be someone not entirely familiar with China’s e-commerce or instant messaging companies, so I drew parallels of these companies to those of the US’ that reach a far wider audience all across the world. Also, among the numerous events that the company deems ‘significant’, which are the ones that I should fit into my timeline to answer my research question? Looking at reports from the perspective of a typical consumer, I picked out the ones that are most meaningful to the public and omitted what may be relevant to perhaps an investor or even the government.

I don’t want my final project to just be a business report of the three different companies I have decided to focus on without any further analysis of the data and pieces of information collected. It is definitely more difficult finding relevant reports and articles in these areas that add meaning to the data available, and this is an area I will continue to work on.

Methodology and Digital Tools

June 28, 2017 /

My Digital ToolChest:

Voyant

Antconc

TimeMapper

Alchemy API

Scalar

As the end of the digital scholarship program comes swiftly along, I have revised and critiqued my own research question multiple times. I believe this is the most challenging aspect of research for me. I always have a larger vision for my project because I see it encompassing a variety of geographic regions and a multitude of digital tools for analysis. After much discussion and deliberation, I am now on the right track to finish my research project: The Representation of Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Miners: An Artistic Movement. (This title is a work in progress as well!)

I recently began archiving information on various monuments throughout the central PA anthracite region, finding a variety of coal miner statues in all three prominent coal fields: northern, middle, and southern. After I find ten monuments, I will choose five that are the most intricate and thought-provoking monuments, and pinpoint that certain location. I will then collect newspaper articles from these regions, searching the word “coal miner”. My date range will be after the fall of the coal industry between 1970 to present day.  I hope to gather at least 20 articles per area. (or more if possible)

I will OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the newspapers, gathering all the text throughout the five areas. Then, I will use Voyant and Antconc looking at how miners are represented within these texts. I will look for romanticizations of the miners too.

Then, I will use Alchemy API to perform sentiment analysis on the newspapers. I want to see if the computer generates that these are mostly positive or negative representations.

I will then compare these with sentiment and text analysis of 20 newspapers from Shamokin, PA. Thus, I will see if there are any difference in towns that publicly represent coal miners against a town that does not choose to represent coal miners through monuments.

Also, I will critique the monuments with theories about public memory and the geographical location of the monument.

The end result of my findings will be displayed on a scalar site that will include a map of Pennsylvania, which displays the locations of each monument. Additionally, I will have a timeline that shows the monuments. There will be a page for each monument with its metadata and a critique of it too.

Finally, there will be a page on the text/sentiment analysis and a bibliography.

There is much to be done in four weeks, but I believe I am on the right track and moving full speed ahead!

 

 

Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region

June 28, 2017 /

Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region

There are a plethora of occupations that are dependent upon the formation of the land in a certain location.  The development and design of a landscape has a lasting impact on the means of production and labor that create an effective economy. In central Pennsylvania, the anthracite coal mining region began in roughly 1792 with the founding of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company by Josiah White and Erskine Hazard. This was the first commercially operated coal mine. The anthracite region would see new mines developing throughout prominently six counties: Luzerne, Lackawanna, Carbon, Northumberland, Columbia, and Schuylkill. Thus geographically, there are northern, middle, and southern anthracite fields.

As anthracite mining began spreading rapidly throughout central Pennsylvania, many problems arose surrounding working conditions, town life, pay, etc. It was common for miners to have major and minor accidents within and outside of the mines. There were many perilous activities a miner had to perform.

The coal companies began hiring boys to work in the mines as early as ages six to eight. They would pick rock, slate, and refuse out of the coal in the breaker; an arduous and dangerous task for a young boy.[1] There were usually contract miners, laborers, foremen, and superintendents that worked per colliery. There was a large inequality of wages between laborers and miners that caused a further divide between ethnic enclaves. The Welsh immigrants who were skilled miners who usually became the foremen and superintendents of a colliery. While Irish immigrants were “distrusted” by the coal owners and other miners. This was partly because of the Molly Maguire movement, who were accused of murder, arson, and other crimes throughout the mining districts.

Nevertheless, the dangers and the perils of a coal miner were extreme. The mines could be very difficult to mine in without proper lightning, protection, ventilation, or other essential equipment. Usually due to poor ventilation, mine fires would trap miners in the coal mines and the only means of escape was the main shaft, which at times would be destroyed by flames.[2] Other mining accidents included accidents due to poor quality of the colliery with columns falling on people, and commonly floods, which would occur when a geological depression in the mine filled with water and created a flood in the mine.[3] If a miner did not die from an accident in the coal mine, it was common to die from “miner’s lung” or “black lung” from the sulfur toxins in the mines. In order to provide for their families and contribute to the economic prosperity of their town, miners would sacrifice their well-being and risk death.[4]

In order to preserve the heritage and culture of the coal mining industry, while paying homage to the coal miners and their families, some anthracite communities choose to represent coal miners through monuments. These representations are sometimes specific to a certain town’s coal history, however, many represent the greater Pennsylvania anthracite region.

By critiquing the two out-facing public mediums, newspapers and monuments, I will investigate how Pennsylvania anthracite coal communities choose to represent their coal heritage.

[1]  Janet MacGaffey, Coal Dust on Your Feet: The Rise, Decline, and Restoration of an Anthracite Mining Town (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 23.

[2] Ibid., 25.

[3] Ibid., 25.

[4] The few descriptions of different types of accidents in the coal mines is not an exhaustive list. There were many other perils and dangers depending on the skill level of a miner or laborer and the quality of the colliery and its owners.

Week 4 Recap: Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (or, DSSRF Takes a Road Trip)

June 27, 2017 /

Week 4 marked the halfway point of our program, and fittingly we spent this week finishing up our review of tools. Monday we worked with timeline and mapping applications, including TimelineJS, StoryMapJS, and Timemapper. They all work on very similar infrastructure, although TimelineJS is more well-developed than the other two, and each platform allows for embedding of multimedia components, so a timeline or storymap can contain more than just images and text. We did a practice exercise with TimelineJS, and started building a timeline of James Merrill Linn’s life, including excerpts from his Civil War diaries that we worked with in our text encoding sessions. On Tuesday, Diane Jakacki joined us again for an overview of Google Fusion Tables, Palladio, and Gephi. These applications support a number of different forms of data visualization, including network graphs and maps. We looked at Micki Kaufman’s Quantifying Kissinger project as an example of some of the very sophisticated visualizations that can be created using Gephi. This was by far the most complex of the tools we’ve worked with all summer, and in the end we learned that no one should Gephi alone 😉

On Wednesday we convened to share some initial project components that the students had been working on. No spoilers, but I will say that everyone is making tremendous progress and that it’s so rewarding to see project ideas coming to life in various digital platforms. I’m very impressed with the students’ decisions about what tools they’ll be using, and their ability to make a case for why those particular tools are suited for each project. I suspect we’ll still be working through some final decisions about tools in the coming weeks, but for now, you can read more about their tool choices in our Week 4 reflections.

On Thursday, we took our much-anticipated trip to Bryn Mawr College for #dsmeet17. A small group of program facilitators of digital scholarship summer programs conceived of the idea of this meetup earlier this year, and it was a great opportunity for us all to get together and talk with folks from several institutions. In addition to the DSSRF cohort, students from programs at Lafayette, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Swarthmore, and Penn were in attendance, as were librarians and instructional technologists from each institution. A centerpiece of the day were the lightning talks; through these we were able to learn about a wide variety of digital scholarship projects that students are working on. A number of the projects discussed focused on themes of identity and cross-cultural contexts, and a few students mentioned their hope to translate their projects into their native languages. The range of project topics was far-reaching, and included: representations of disability in love reality television; Sami identity in Sweden; text encoding of documents related to William Penn’s contact with American Indians; stratification in Bogota, Colombia; and creating apps for the Microsoft HoloLens. Some of the projects were more developed than others; for example, the Lafayette students were just one week from completing their program, so they had mostly finished sites to showcase. Our students remarked that seeing finished (or nearly finished) projects gave them a better sense of the process and what they are working towards. Once again, I was impressed with their enthusiasm and passion for their research that came through in each of their lightning talks. Each student is working on a project that is deeply personal to them, and they were able to convey that to the audience in a short amount of time. The program facilitators also had an opportunity to meet and talk over lunch, and it was great to exchange ideas about how our programs are run and consider changes we might make in future years.

As we move into the second half of our program, it’s astonishing to realize how quickly time is going this summer. As Courtney said a couple of weeks ago, it has been extremely rewarding and gratifying to watch our students work through the research process, continually hone their ideas, and give feedback to each other on their projects. We’re excited to see what happens in the next four weeks, and how each student’s project turns out!

Week 4 – Justin

June 26, 2017 /

The tools I plan on using are:

  • Tableau
  • Scalar
  • Timeline JS
  • Voyant

I’m using Tableau in order to create data visualizations from the data I’ve been collecting on the 2016 year from films from 12 production companies. Tableau has so many ways to customize the visualizations that it would make sense to use it so that my data visualizations are both clear and easy to read while also being interactive and making the user experience better.

Scalar is a great way for me to present my project. At Bryn-Mawr, I got to see the different ways other students were using Scalar and now I have an idea as to how my project will actually be structured as a site. It will start with an introduction to LGBT representation in both Hollywood and Independent cinema. I’ll use the timeline feature that Scalar has or Timeline JS in order to display a timeline of important moments relating to LGBT representation in cinema. The next part will be the data visualizations from the 2016 year, so people can get a sense of what representation looks like today. This will aid in the final part. The part after the data visualizations will be my case studies of specific films and an important concept relating to LGBT representation in film such as “Race and Culture” and “Authenticity.” I want to create at least one or two more case studies. The final part will be the discussion section. With all of the data that was presented and the different concepts relating to representation being explained people who are well versed on LGBTQ+ issues and people who aren’t will be able to have a constructive conversation about representation in cinema.

Voyant is one of the tools I plan on using for my case study on Moonlight. I’m going to analyze the script and discuss the representation of an LGBT character in regards to race and culture. I won’t need it for my case study on Authenticity, but depending on the other case studies I decide to do I may use it.

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