Visualizing Ancient Past – Week 9

unnamed

The idea that we may be able to recreate something that is so far away, in time and location, is incredible. To be able to recreate even partially what ancient Rome was like will give new perspectives to many. Walking through Rome in current day, although there are ruins and you are still able to imagine what life was like, it doesn’t come anywhere close to the real thing. The visualization that Favro is talking about makes this much more of a reality. You can get so much more of a feel for the ancient city if it looks like you are actually walking through the buildings at eye level. I do also like that the project focuses on the physical history and buildings and strays away from including people in it because it is “distracting.”
This made me think of the street view option that Google Maps has to offer. Although the intention of the map is for you to more easily visualize where you are going, it can also be used in a similar matter. Even in the picture, you can clearly see that the purpose of the map is not intended to give anyone a realistic idea of the area. However, it does have real cars and real people on the street as it would at any given moment. However, the picture quality tends to be a little grainy. It does create a snapshot of the world as we know it today, just as we are trying to recreate with Rome. You could potentially “walk through” the streets in other areas by just searching them on a map. Of course, the representation of Rome is much more detailed and well thought out, it is more or less the same concept – giving people the ability to see what something is really like without being there. While you can never retain the whole ambience of a setting through a visualization, creating something that looks like you could be walking through it makes it a much more realistic case.

Favro, Diane. “Methodological Essays « Visualizing Statues.” Visualizing Statues. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Dec. 2014.

Web Maps & iPhone Camera Apps

What I found most interesting about the web-mapping article was that it was displayed and loaded in tiles. I had never noticed before, but when you zoom in there is indeed different places and different tiles that it takes you. I had always wondered why MapQuest ceased to exist and I guess now I know why, because it was always one big image. Also what I thought was interesting was that you had to be connected to the Internet in order to figure out where you were going. However, your phone is still able to track your location when you are not connected to Internet so I am unsure of how this works. When I was abroad I could always look on Google Maps and see exactly where my location was. This came in use when it came to my pictures. Even though I wasn’t connected to WiFi or cellular data, my phone was able to locate where I was taking my pictures and separated them by place.

IMG_0363 IMG_0364

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indeed, this could not be possible without web mapping. Even when my photos were all taken on the same day and I only moved around a little, they still appeared on the map in different locations (pictured above). While I do think this is useful and handy, I also find it a little creepy. When I was abroad I was shocked that I could see where I was on the map even though I wasn’t connected to Internet. There was nothing except for my phone and Google knew where I was. Web mapping is incredibly useful and I can’t picture our society today without GPS while driving (help us all if that day ever comes…) but there is still a sense of privacy I would like to maintain that I think may just be gone forever. However, I guess that is what happens with all of technology in today’s age; privacy is slowly diminishing as more and more things are being posted to the web with tags and metadata linking them to companies and specific people. Web mapping has definitely made this more possible by focusing on specific regions to locate who took what images and where.

Demystifying Networks – Relationship Networks

relationship_network_social

The part of this reading that stuck out the most to me was the idea that putting data into networks is like trying to fit “square pegs in round holes.” We always assume that everything we want to explain can be explained – but this might not be the case. In order to put items into graphs or networks, you pull out the similarities between the items to relate them to other things. In this process, some of the complexity may be lost because the network doesn’t represent the individual uniqueness of each item. But even so, as he mentions in his blog post, networks become seemingly less useful when they are more complex and dense. In this sense, it makes it seem to me that networks should be used to show relationships between things that maybe are simple and don’t have a lot in common but are somehow connected in some way.

In my opinion, the most interesting types of networks are those that involve relationships between people. Part of the reason I became interested in Digital Humanities in the first place was because I find it fascinating to interconnect technology with real people. In networking relationships, you can put on display a relationship that is not visible in the real world. You can take feelings and connections and make them tangible. This really is putting a square peg in a round hole, though, because relationships aren’t meant to be networked. Humans and human qualities aren’t meant to be translated into computer code – and yet, we’ve done it! The easiest and most concrete example of this would definitely be a family tree. It displays visually the ties between people using edges. We may not know exactly how we are connected to a family member way in the past, and this network visualization would be able to tell us this. Relationship networks are just the most fascinating to me because it still captures something so real. It is much easier to understand the relationship between a book and its author and to put it on paper to show the relationship, but relationships between people are so complex that to stick them on a graph with lines connecting them to a few other things simplifies their depth tremendously. But this is what networks are all about, translating something into a manner of understanding that can prove a specific point.

Weingart, Scott. “Demystifying Networks.” Scottbot. N.p., 14 Dec. 2011. Web.

Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display

For many years now, data has been placed into simplistic visualizations for its readers to view. The problem with this: the word simplistic. Although it is useful for readers and viewers to be able to see a statistical data set in just a chart, it leaves a lot of things out. There is no way that a massive, complex research project can be boiled down into just a few charts or pie graphs. And here lies the problem with visualized data – it’s misleading.

375x247xterry-schiavo-misleading-graph.jpg.pagespeed.ic.aetQIotsuy

 

Even if it doesn’t have to do with research or complexity, graphs are also often misleading in terms of public opinion or statistics regarding our country. For example, this graph displaying how many Republicans, Democrats and Independents agreed with a court ruling. In the graph, the bar for the Democrats appears to be about three times larger than the bar for the Republicans and the Democrats. This makes it seem that three times more Democrats supported the decision than either the Republicans or Democrats. However, this is not the case at all because the left axis doesn’t start at zero. Instead, it only goes from 50 to 64 percent, therefore making any deviation seem much larger. Had the graph’s axis begun at zero, the difference in support would appear to be much smaller. This is what I mean by data misrepresentation – people who make the graphs can alter them to have them display very different meanings that the actual data represents.

While this may not seem like a large problem in society, in can turn out to be. When reliable news stations release media, people just take them without questioning it when it may be completely misrepresented. However, most people in this day and age don’t question what they are being told – they just accept it. Especially if it comes from the government or a source that they have relied on and trusted for a very long time. With new technology it is important that people actually pay attention to what they are looking at.

 

“Misleading Graphs: Real Life Examples.” Statistics How To. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Nov. 2014.

Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly:. Digital Humanities Quarterly, n.d. Web. 03 Nov. 2014.

Netflix & Pandora

After reading the article “How Netflix Reverse Engineered HollywoodI couldn’t be more intrigued. It was always nice that Netflix would recommend movies to me but I never really put too much thought into it. I would say nine times out of ten, there is a recommendation for me waiting when I finish my series or movie that I’ll actually watch. For example, (and please don’t judge me for my taste in television here), I had just finished watching One Tree Hill when Netflix recommended that I watch Desperate Housewives. These series are so completely different in terms of what they’re about, the age demographic, the setting, etc. but Netflix knew based on who else watched it and everything else that I had watched that I would love it too! And now, thanks to Alexis Madrigal, we know that this is because of the absurd amounts of categorization, metadata and refined vocabulary that Netflix uses.

For me personally, I found it interesting that the categorizations were so specific. It’s hard to fathom that there were people that went through all of the movies available on Netflix to tag them with enormous amounts of metadata – and some of the categories are so oddly specific. This got me thinking about Pandora. Similar to Netflix, Pandora uses what you like/ have listened to in order to recommend new music. Although there are differences – Pandora is music, Netflix is film, Pandora uses “thumbs up” and Netflix uses stars for ratings, I have to imagine that Pandora must have a similarly specific metadata process it uses in order to produce music that people will enjoy. Like Madrigal said, “The better Netflix shows that it knows you, the likelier you are to stick around.” And this is true for Pandora as well. If I put on a station that gives me five songs in a row that I don’t really care for, I’m going to use a different site to listen to music. However, the main difference between these two sites is probably that Pandora is free while Netflix costs about eight dollars per month. Because of this, it would be more detrimental for Netflix to lose its customers. Of course Pandora wants to be a successful site (which it already is) but they don’t have a tangible loss when people stop listening to them.

 

Madrigal, Alexis C. “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 02 Jan. 2014. Web. 20 Oct. 2014.

Results of Technology in the New Age – Haiti

What I found most interesting about the Haiti article is that something as small-scale as a dissertation could have such an impact on an entire country. When Julia Gaffield set out to write her dissertation about Haiti, I’m sure she didn’t expect to bring hope to all of the people of Haiti. She reminded them that they had already overcome something incredible and had gained their independence, which helped them to believe that they would be able to again rebuild after the devastating earthquake. Mostly I like the article because it illustrates how one person can cause such a massive effect on something else. That it only takes one to create a wave, or ignite a spark or start a revolution. Julia was determined to learn more about Haiti even though the odds were against her and luckily for the entire world, she was that one person that cared enough to make a difference.

Unfortunately, this reminds me of the article I read very recently about the spread of the cholera disease in Haiti. It is a painful reminder that it is still a third world country and although there have been advancements and although the discovery of their Declaration of Independence was crucial during such a hard time for them after the earthquake, Haiti is still in desperate need of help. It was heartbreaking to read that over 8,000 people have died from this disease that was introduced into their country by United Nations peacekeepers.

The article by Julia Gaffield about her dissertation and the archives demonstrates how useful it is to have archives and technology to be able to share such wonderful news. It it truly incredible that something one person found can be so easily shared around the world in order to create a larger impact. Sadly, we are also reminded of the work we still have to do in this world, seeing as countries such as Haiti still don’t have proper health care in the year 2014.

 

Gaffield, Julia. “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence: Digging for Lost Documents in the Archives of the Atlantic World-Vol. 2, No. 1.” The Appendix Combined. N.p., 5 Feb. 2014. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.

Cave, Damien. “Lawsuit Against U.N. on the Spread of Cholera Epidemic in Haiti Advances.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 08 Oct. 2014. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.