Author: agershman

For this assignment, I selected the short story First Semester Rachel B. Glasser and John Maradik from Granta Magazine, edition 136 – Legacies of Love, published October 31, 2016.

The story revolves around the experiences of a group of young college students living away from home for the first time at an eastern university. As the primary protagonist Sarah begins the process of learning a new form of social navigation, her circle of friends and acquaintances morphs and expands to include a sexual and social rival knows as Opposite Worlds Girl.

To create a model of the social network, I created an edge list to include every character named, addressed and described by the authors.  This grew to include a total of 16 characters, who comprised the nodes of the list. I created links between any character that shared space, conversation or interaction with another.  I weighted the connections on a scale from 1 to 3 based upon the relative impact of one character’s role upon the other.

For example – Sarah and the Turtle – Sarah takes the Turtle in as a form of emotional recompense for her lack of ability to connect with David. In her care the Turtle dies.  The weight of this connection is a 3.

Sarah and Boy@Party1 – the boy is attracted to Sarah but nothing comes of it and he doesn’t reappear – the weight of the connection is a 1.

Georgie and Boy@Party2 – Georgie and the boy are attracted to each other and holding hands by the end of the party.  It is implied that they sleep together, but he fails to reappear the weight of the connection is a 2.

I used Prof. Posner’s tutorial to create a simple social network model, found here.

I spent some time with the Digital Harlem map and found myself wondering how the researches responsible for its organization must have felt about the data as it presented itself. The description of the project contained in the About section details the wishes of the authors to create a sort of snapshot into the lives of the poor and working class ordinary African American denizens of Harlem during the period in question. At one point they refer to arrest and legal records that indicate the behavior not only of hardened criminals, but of first time offenders and ordinary people driven to criminal acts out of desperation. It bears noting that the jurisdictional recordkeeping of the local authorities gave criminal designations to private behavior, such as the category of “Divorce Raid”. My research found that this designation referred to the police breaking and busting up illicit unions between people married to others, most often deployed by wronged spouse to either assure or prevent the issuance of alimony.
Turnbull states:
“Any recounting, whether ancestral, historical or contemporary, is framed by a discussion of place: where events happened. Events coalesce in space rather than in time; landscape punctuates stories, and behind this is the ‘working assumption’ that human activities ‘create’ places by socialising space.” (Exhibit 5, page 2)
If this is so, then these forays into the more somber and entirely human landscape of early 20th century Harlem would demonstrate a place created almost entirely by a white power structure that sought to control and police a black population corralled by definitions. White on Black policing is far from peaceful, even today. That Harlem in the maps is defined by language more likely than not generated and issued by law enforcement officers where were not part of the community and judgments were implicit in the generation of arrest records. An overlay of the categories Gambling and Meeting reveals a correlation between social gatherings and gambling, which might have it reconsidered less as a facet of organized crime and more as an aspect of social gathering – but it is booked as a crime.

An overlay of Divorce_Raid and Prostitution creates an interesting diagram of good and bad neighborhoods in Harlem – Divorce Raids happened in every quarter and at every income level, but prostitution clusters to specific lower income areas. One must ask oneself when the two overlap, was there an automatic prostitution charge leveled on women who found themselves in these rooms as the police burst in?

Per Turnbull, human activities created these places and spaces. How and why the activities were recorded is one thing in the estimation of the people who wrote it down a hundred years ago and another in the estimation of those who sought to recreate a very specific window into early 20th century Harlem. The map opens a perspective on the human activities of the residents of that community, but the prejudices inherent to the initial recording of the events does little to give a reflection of life in the sunlight vs in the shadows. The ontologies of the moment used to categorize these activities reveal a government bent on intrusion and subjugation. While there is a great deal of beauty in the truths that are ferreted out of these records, there is too much left unsaid.
An alternate map would effect a more accurate picture of life on the ground. I imagine an image gallery that details the morning and evening commutes of the residents of Harlem. There would photographs of the home of each subject, of their commuter line (train, streetcar, morning walk) and of their workplace. The juxtaposition between where they live and where they work might tell us a great deal more about how they experienced the world. I would try also to include photographs of local merchants they might visit on the way home and as much moving image stock as possible that would detail the activity and energy of the streets and routes they took.

This wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped but 90% of it turned out okay – as of Saturday night it’s up and running but somehow the pic disappeared. I may be able to correct by Sunday night stay tuned.
http://www.howtheotherhalflived.com/AGindex.html
http://www.howtheotherhalflived.com/AGstyle.css

 

Part 2

Okay, this has been quite an exercise.  In all frankness, I LOVED writing the code.  I spent most of Saturday afternoon working on it and I didn’t even notice time passing.  Getting it loaded to the server – that was something different.  But its up.  The pic won’t load but we’ll cover it in class – and most of it is up.  Here you go.

http://www.howtheotherhalflived.com/classdocs/index.html

 

Part 3 – http://howtheotherhalflived.com/anastasia/index.html

 

For the purposes of this week’s assignment, I chose to use Wordle.net to create a visualization of our dataset – NY Tenements.  The dataset itself is a photo record of the New York tenements taken by inspectors during the 1934-1938 period.  The photos and any related records were gifted to the New York public library and archived in series of eight volumes, most of which were digitized or placed on microfiche, after which the nitrate based original negatives were destroyed.  A challenging feature of the dataset is the scarcity of information contained in each individual record – the majority of the information given is stored as a note attached to the record and each record contains a link not to the photograph but the page on which it is displayed.  There are a total of 1102 records

Given the wealth of information contained in the notes section, we drew from there and  created a  word cloud based upon the frequency of individual words used in the info provided.  I formatted the resulting word cloud based on personal taste.  I wanted to understand with what frequency the records identified location, building types and/or human presence in the photographs.  Looking at the visualization, I understand that overwhelmingly the images are derived from properties located in Manhattan, with Brooklyn coming in a second and the Bronx a distant third.  Interestingly, Queens barely registers at all, from which I might derive different meanings but that I know now that I need to look at more closely.  I can also surmise from the visualization that the records are predominantly of building exteriors, and that if human presence is noted, it is most often of children.  What I cannot surmise are the motivations of the individual inspectors who were taking the photographs and their choices regarding content.  I would move forward from this visualization by isolating more specific address information where it is available and looking for patterns that might indicate human condition, ethnic concentrations and/or the ways of occupying public/private spaces that might generate insight and the ability to formulate better questions.

 

 

 

 

 

For the purpose of this assignment I selected the dataset Gender Breakdown of City Workers by Department.  The dataset can be found here.

 

The dataset identifies employee earnings by gender across the various city department of Los Angeles.   A record in this particular dataset includes:

• The name of the department
• The total number of employees; and the breakdown between male and female in numerical and percentage form.
• The total payroll spend of the department; and the total and percentage of total payroll spend allocated to males vs. females.
• The average salary for each gender.

Per Wallack and Srinivasan, this dataset and its meta-ontology would be used to track and understand demographics across the breadth of the different departments in the City of Los Angeles, and to understand the relationships between gender and salary.  There is an aspect of self-policing inherent in the creation and administration of the dataset, with the city seeking to monitor hiring practices and possible imbalances in payroll administration.

City Supervisors, Ethics Committees and Title IX administrators might find this data useful. Regular inspection of this information makes sense as part of ongoing efforts to create gender pay equality and also in hopes of routing out institutional discrimination that opens up the city to legal and moral liability.

The dataset details total payroll spend per department and also the breakdown between men and women, including total payroll spend per gender and average salary per gender. What the dataset illustrates is that with the exception of three departments out of forty, men drew higher average salaries than women.  What isn’t detailed is the length of employment or particular details about the inner workings of each department.  Most permanent city employees receive raises on a regular schedule commensurate with the length of time with the job, so if women joined the department after gender integration, that will have an effect on their salaries.  Pursuant to understanding the inner workings of each department, there is no information of promotion strategies within the departments that might skew results.  The fire and police departments offer regular opportunities to move up the ladder, and each promotion results in a pay increase.  If women are being denied the opportunities to advance, it could explain the lower pay across the board, but the information isn’t here.  I can parse out who makes what, but from the data given, I can’t get insight in to the culture and values of the respective departments.  Women are also subject to physical limitations of pregnancy and maternity leave after delivering, causing them to be absent for longer periods of time from the workforce on maternity pay, which is usually a percentage of their regular salary, and can affect these numbers.

A different ontology for this data would include the average length of employment for each gender by department and would allow for seniority, medical and maternity/paternity leaves. It might be interesting to include information about complaints of gender and wage discrimination per department, also logged by gender, to have a better sense of which departments might or might not be tilted toward favoring a specific gender.

 

The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee Records 1942-1945 focus on media and PR materials created and/or gathered by the group of the same name in their efforts to rouse and sway public opinion in the indictment of 22 young Hispanic men on trial for murder. After 12 of the defendants were convicted 1st degree murder in 1942, the committee’s efforts garnered celebrity attention and backing and was successful in changing public opinion – which eventually led to the reversal of the murder convictions in 1944. It is a collection of 11 boxes of archived material, available through the UCLA Library Special Collections with advance notice. The archival collection ranges from biographies, press releases, petitions and correspondence all the way up to a copy of the transcript of the appeals trial.
The Sleepy Lagoon Murder of Jose Diaz predates the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles but the crime and the subsequent trials and media campaigns figure into the political and cultural climate in which the riots occurred, and are often mentioned in histories as a direct precursor to those events. This collection’s extensive documentation of institutional and cultural prejudice against the Latino population of Los Angeles could prove useful to scholars seeking to understand the cultural context of the Zoot Suit Riots and the changing face of Los Angeles during World War 2. However, more interesting would be using the records to delve into the relationship between celebrity, Hollywood and social activism.
The story told by these records details the waging of an aggressive public relations campaign by the committee on behalf of the defendants, enlisting the aid of Hollywood influencers whose efforts are documented therein. The first item in Box 1 of the collection is a letter from Orson Welles written directly to the parole board overseeing the cases of the defendants. The letter articulates his concerns regarding the role of prejudice against the Mexican-American community may have led to an unjust conviction, and pleads for their release. The breadth of the records cover a flurry of media activity over a three-year period that demonstrate public relations and social activism best practices. A media scholar looking for a deeper understanding of public relations practices before the advent of television would find this material rich and rewarding. Being able to place the media campaign in a specific space and place would make cross-referencing other local collections that tackle Mexican-American history in Los Angeles possible. However, one might not necessarily be able to access the contextual information needed to understand the leveraging of relationships and professional networks in place that made the waging of the campaign possible. To remedy that shortcoming, it would be helpful to locate a separate archive detailing the professional lives and connections of press members also working in Los Angeles during the early to mid-1940’s.

 

 Early African American Film 

This project attempts to catalogue and articulate the African American Silent Race filmmaking tradition from the onset of the major motion picture industry in 1909 until the coming of sound in the late 1920’s, effectively limiting the scope of study to films made 1909-1930.  The team examined the unique challenges faced by black filmmakers during this period with an eye toward understanding the production cycle, audiences, actors and other attribute of a filmmaking landscape that is often overlooked in contemporary and historical cinema studies.   While “Race Film” is a designation that applies globally to films produced in the first half of the 20^th century for black audiences, the team limited the date range of the study to better examine the early silent film years of this particular genre.

Source material for the project reveals a set of challenges that are endemic to the study of the silent film era but magnified exponentially in the study of this less-documented and studied subgenre; a great deal of the films themselves have been lost to time.  The team attempted to create a window into the genre through the use of historical archives (sources),  preserved footage (see film), and to create through the exploration of past and current scholarship a comprehensive definition of what constitutes African American Race film (definition).

The data was presented in an Airtable spreadsheet searchable by filmmaker, film title, production company or source material used (see table here).   The project team included a comprehensive set of tutorials to help users sort and filter data according to their individual needs (tutorials).  These tutorials guide users in the particulars of using the spreadsheet data, creating individually tailored maps reflecting the research, or the creation of a network graph to model the information.

Presentation of the information is particularly effective in the capacity of site visitors to interact with the material and extract what they need in different forms.   Information can be filtered and presented in histogram, network model or map form in addition to the data tables presented in the spreadsheet.  The information can be sorted along a timeline as necessary to have a more exact idea of the industry trend in a specific year.  The home page of the website contains a direct link to the history page that contextualizes the history and ongoing study of this silent Race filmmaking tradition and facilitating in some ways greater specificity in subsequent searches by providing background information on the movement and major players.