Author: crystalqn

I chose the short story “Blue Jay” by Lillian Li for this week’s blog post. This story follows the complicated close friendship between the narrator and a girl named Jay, encompassing the tragedy, addiction, romance, anxieties, and painful events that the two experience with one another. The narrator tells the story of their relationship by reflecting back on moments that reveal both of their insecurities and struggles, left as unspoken words and disregarded text messages by the end of the summer in which it takes place.

The network map I created exhibits all of the characters – which are my nodes – mentioned in the short story that create some type of impact on Jay and the narrator’s lives. The two girls are central on the map, and the thickness of the lines connecting the characters vary based on the strength of the relationship. The connections are based on either encounters that Jay shared with the narrator or flashbacks, revealing her vulnerabilities from past romantic relationships and several step-relatives that bear no significant familial bond with her. Jay’s side of the map seems to be much more extensive than the narrator’s, but most of the connections are short-lived relationships with random men she’s infatuated with, lead to dead ends, or are distant family that only further isolates Jay (such as her distress over how her step-sister had a baby, triggering her lack and need of being mothered herself). On the narrator’s side, she has few connections but they represent her sense of security and belonging in comparison to Jay. Her parents coddle her even while away in college, hence the thicker lines connecting to Mom and Dad, and her ability to fit in with the classmates at the party contrasts with Jay’s awkwardness and home-schooled habits. The Chinese program teachers (the narrator studied at Beijing over the summer) is the only other connection that Jay and the narrator have in common, because those tutoring sessions were the only time the narrator openly confided in someone about her anxieties regarding Jay – and the teachers knew concealed secrets about Jay indirectly through these stories.

While the network map illuminates many relationships that shape a character whether it’s directly or indirectly, it does have its limitations. The connections between the characters merely show how strong it is, but does not tell the story behind it or if it’s a positive or negative effect in the concerned parties’ lives. It also lacks a visual representation of location, which plays a crucial role during the story since the characters were across the globe (Beijing, Australia, New England) and a major source that carries on the narration are bits of text messages rather than face-to-face interactions.

I decided to explore the Mapping Decadence project, which serves to show how location influenced the collaborations between Decadent writers and their publishers at the end of the nineteenth century in Paris. There is a separate satellite map for each author in question – Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Rachilde, and Marcel Schwob – with color-coded pins indicating where the author lived and where the publisher was located (red). Each pin has a pop-up box indicating when they lived at a certain address, what books they published and with whom, where they were living or working at the time, and where their publishers were located.

Although this project appears to be straightforward in providing factual and objective information, there are several aspects that enforce Turnbull’s contention that maps are perspectival and subjective. The maps only indicate where the authors and publishers lived at certain times and the titles of what they published, but fails to give any other information on how these factors influenced the collaborations. Publishers are more associated with the final product of an author’s work rather than the process of writing it, and this map assumes that recognizing the publishers’ presence captures the heart of the Decadent movement. Other factors of environment and proximity that could have been acknowledged on the map are schools or churches, which may have had some level of influence over the symbolism and aestheticism that Decadence writers followed. For instance, one of the pins states that Lorrain “studies law and moves frequently” – this could be expanded on, such as if he still studied law in Paris, where he studied it, and if that correlated with his works. 

Some background information about each author and publisher would be useful as well. Surely as figures in the Decadent Movement, the writers were familiar with one another or found inspiration from other writers/artists. This could be shown in more detail with additional pop-up boxes on the map, or even on the webpage itself on each author’s page as a sort of premise to the map. The map only shows connections (the lines) with authors and their publishers, but the close proximity amongst all the writers likely also fostered relationships. I believe that an alternate map could keep the satellite layout, but include a larger color-code key to include different writers/ other locations besides the publishers’, as well as more lines connecting pinpoints to show the effects of location. 

http://introducingamericanfashion.com/crystalswebsite/index.html

I used Google Fusion to create a graph displaying my data, which indicates the United States population in each decennial census from 1790 to 2010.

Since there were only two columns – year and population – I figured a simple bar graph would be clear in organizing the population number on the y-axis versus the year on the x-axis. The graph allows us to encode values to the image because we can take into consideration the length of the bars and the upward trend. When looking at the data itself, there’s a jumble of numbers without commas that makes the numerical value difficult to identify; however, inputing this information into a bar graph allows us to gauge the rise and decline.

The information can lead us to consider more research questions, such as influences on increase of population throughout the decades. Things we could look into based off of the data are the quality of health facilities, reasons for fluctuating birth and death rate, water/food accessibility, immigration/emigration, etc. Also, the data encourages us to look into specific states/areas and how much they constitute the percentage of the total country population, so that we could target problem areas for research.

 

 

I examined the Payroll by Position data set, which organizes the payroll information for all Los Angeles City Departments since 2013. The data categorizes financial details based on very specific job positions, even separating roles with the same name into a different row (i.e. “Senior Management Analyst II” versus “Senior Management Analyst I,” and even those position with the exact same name is distinguished by record number/ employee id). The job department title and year constitutes a record in this dataset, branching into 34 categories including: record number, class title, employment type, projected annual salary, Q1-Q4 payments, payments over base pay, & over base pay, total payments, base pay, permanent bonus pay, longevity bonus pay, temporary bonus pay, lump sum pay, overtime pay, other pay & adjustments, other pay (payroll explorer), MOU title, FMS Department, job class, pay grade, average health cost, average dental cost, average basic life, average benefit cost, benefits plan, and job class link.

In reference in Wallack and Srinivasan’s definition, this dataset’s ontology provides information on based on meta ontologies that may be mismatched with community ontologies, therefore leading to information loss and resulting inaccuracy. The data is collected and organized by the Los Angeles City Controller/Control Panel and therefore considered a large-scale dataset, making it difficult to incorporate into local, contextualized knowledge more specific to certain parts of the city. This ontology would make the most sense to a city official or manager, as it is helps them consider how much revenue is allocated to employee salaries and how to balance payroll for the most effective cash flow.

The dataset claims to hold a firm understanding regarding the payroll of a working class citizen of Los Angeles, as it lists a variety of job class levels from custodian to manager, part- and full-time, and lower- to upper-middle class salaries. Although the dataset provides a structure to determine which departments and offices is in need, the payroll information is monitored and controlled by the city and leaves out the perspective and input of the community. If the data-collection were influenced by the community ontology, the data would more resourcefully reflect societal concerns based off of economic conditions of certain regions, relevant skills and experience of individual employees/applicants, consistency for job roles and corresponding duties, etc.

I chose to examine the finding aid of the Walt Disney Productions Publicity Ephemera (1938-198x), which is collected from Walt Disney Productions’ publicity ephemera created for feature-length and short subject films. The contents, enclosed within eight 4.0 linear ft. boxes and three flat oversize boxes, consists of 280 total of the following: press kits, press books, publicity stills, lobby cards, and publicity biographies for over 150 Disney titles mostly produced from 1950 to the 1980s. The collection’s finding aid gives important details such as regarding the repository, location stored, restrictions on use and reproduction, biography, scope and content, and how it is organized and arranged. In this case, the container list is arranged alphabetically by project title, indicating which box and folder it can be found it and the specific year it was created.

Although the content list titles simply give the name of the film and what type of contribution it gave to the animation (i.e. whether it’s a press release, still, actor biography, clipping, etc.), I am able to tell a narrative by gathering an idea of each individual production process and its relation to specific historical periods. Reaching way back into the 1930s, Disney films existed in a large portion of the 20^th century during significant political and social events. As stated in the biography, films created during WWII had the purpose of educating the American public about the war effort, such as the propaganda films for the U.S. government in the 40s. Many Disney titles are household names, considering that the Disney company has made a successful name in family entertainment with its cable television network, motion picture productions, and theme parks. The alphabetical order is useful in giving users easy access to particular family favorites, or to study the origin of older classic films that have been made into new updated releases in recent years. Comparing the process of creating an old-fashioned film (by looking at production handbooks/stills) with the technologically advanced process of new films today (with countless new datasets helping producers appeal to the new age audience) would reveal the timelessness of the storylines and importance of the themes despite the difference in decades.

If I based the narrative entirely on records in this collection, it might be missing credit for all individuals involved behind-the-scenes of the films. While the finding aid does provide the means of exploring a wide range of information on the company’s works, it seems to cover only actor biographies and public relations details. Given that there was the death of Walt Disney and tension in management, it is difficult to tell how these events may have influenced the company. A possible remedy, however, is to further research not only the background of a specific film but also the current events of the time period to gain a better understanding of the viewpoints of both the people involved in the making and the audience.

Sources (assets):

Colored Conventions is a project that includes documents containing the minutes from free and fugitive Blacks’ “Colored Conventions” dating from 1830 to after the Civil War, striving to create awareness and social justice activism by educating scholars through research opportunities. These documents allow the voices (fighting for justice both nationally and locally) of influential figures in the movements – including writers, organizers, church leaders, editors, etc. – to be remembered through compiled materials, many of which are rare or even out-of-print.

Processes (services):

It is interactive in that it allows the option and instructions for any user to contribute to transcribing the minutes for an easier reading format (and bars indicating what percentage is completed). This gives us a different and more modern way at looking at historical nineteenth-century Black organizing documents that would otherwise be buried.

There’s also a whole teaching section with dropdown tabs dedicated to the pedagogic goals of teachers using the site as a guide. It is designed to help teachers with curriculum, transforming the minutes of a convention into engaging cultural biographies, visual artifacts, and interactive media; even includes sample assignments, resources for students to publish online through a digital humanities platform so they can further explore and engage, along with research guides.

Sections for each exhibit cover different topics surrounding the convention – one example includes black boardinghouses, black wealth, and African American women’s economic power. In addition, a symposium page that links us to the participants’ abstracts, bios, and videos, as well as the itinerary and a recap of Twitter activity during the symposium. This allows us to relive the experience (or experience it for the first time) in a sense that it incorporates social media and tools of the digital age that creates a bridge of communication and connection with scholars studying historical racial topics. The website uses online tools like Storify – making a slideshow that allows users to navigate through Twitter posts, which are compiled by searching for the hashtag #2015ccp.

Presentations (display):

Conventions are organized by year and region/national/state. The website is accessible and user-friendly for both students and teachers. Each link to a convention has a document viewer featuring the scanned PDF version of the minutes, in which users can scroll through the pages and zoom in if needed, followed by a user-friendly typed transcription.

The exhibit page consists of an introduction discussing the issue at hand and exposure to the forms of political activism during the conventions movement, then an outline mentioning factors like where the participants are from/how far they travelled to get to the convention and which particular conventions the exhibit will focus on. Users can navigate the exhibit with the right-hand menu bar which has interactive maps and menus, and biographical entries on the people, places, and culture of the conventions movement. By panning around the interactive map – jumping from one location to another and naming the participants – we are able to grasp somewhat of an idea of the limitations/obstacles participants may have faced regarding travel routes and transportation. This is important to learn about the lives and social networks of the delegates – the processes that made the conventions possible.

Slideshows on the African American attendees’ boardinghouses and dining menu gives information paragraphs with the option of clicking on specific items to find out more about it – a glimpse into their daily lives.

Pages of the exhibit are organized with a transitional statement that refers back to the recently discussed topic and how it relates to the next. Users can either go in chronological order or jump back to the beginning to access information.