Author: etheohar

 

“God Bless You, 2011” focuses on the relationship between a bear and their human neighbor on their outdoor excursions in a post-nuclear fallout riverside town. The network graph above focuses on the types of radiation experienced by each character mentioned in the story – Sunglasses and Long Gloves being two characters of whom were only briefly mentioned, but were crucial in introducing the plot device of radiation poisoning.

This graph illuminates the dichotomy present between human and animal susceptibility to different types of radiation poisoning. The narrator, Sunglasses, and Long Gloves, who are all human, are susceptible to Uranium. However, it is implied in the story that both Sunglasses and Long Gloves have been affected by Plutonium and Strontium, as they are actively complaining about the ability of the bear to accept higher exposure to the stuff and not suffer from health complications. However, the narrator, who is in a suit, is never explicitly mentioned as having any direct contact with either Plutonium or Strontium. Thus the narrator is clearly seen as being an outlier in the types and amount of radiation poisoning they are exposed to.

The bear is directly mentioned as having exposure to Plutonium and Strontium, through the complaints of Sunglasses and Long Gloves. It is implied that the bear may also have been exposed by Uranium as well, but this sentiment was not reflected in the chart because it was only implied and not explicitly stated.

This network of poisoning is further complicated by a coloring system which represents each character versus each type of radiation poisoning they have been affected by. Orange denotes the type of radiation, whereas blue denotes the name of the character. The limitations of this chart are many, but the most glaring restriction is the ability of the chart to define the actual radiation amount of each character (e.g. the narrator’s exposure is 30 micro-sieverts in one afternoon alone). This information may be better reflected in a categorical chart, which can accept both the data types of numbers and multiple columns of text, instead of only text, or single columns of text.

Digital Harlem is a project conducted by the University of Sydney in Australia, which seeks to reveal the daily realities of black New Yorkers from the periods of 1915 to 1930.

This mapping represents a picture of black American life whose perspective dominantly reflects the legal records of the court, local law enforcement, and newspaper stories of the time. This clearly bred a bias which reasonably could afflict all documents in the period between 1915 and 1930, which were prone to racial discrimination. While the general coverage of individual stories does not necessarily mean outright discrimination, the breadth of the types of stories available mostly cover crime and violence amidst the black community, which is a limited view that ignores the vibrancy and cultural legacy present in this citizen body pre-1950. This notion is underscored in Turnbull’s essay which mentions the subjective perspective present in archival processes, which explains that bias is an inevitable part of the collection of historical material (the choices made of what to record color the nature of the history we remember).

In light of these observations, this map explicitly obscures the history of “everyday life” for black Americans in New York circa 1915-1930 through a lens which mainly focuses on illegal gambling, number and location of arrests, church locations, and the highlighting of an individual sexual crime investigation. While the map does acknowledge that Harlem churches were a center of cultural richness and expression, these observations are dwarfed by the disproportional amount of news stories and court records which misrepresents the black community (and their “everyday life”) in a criminal light. The news stories in particular almost exclusively focus on police raids and arrests for illegal activity.

What it does reveal is the interest of the NYPD in cracking down on illegal gambling circa 1915-1930, and the prominence of churches in unifying the local black community.  That in mind, if I were to rework this map, I would not necessarily change the visualization of the mapping (which works well in my opinion), but would instead diversify the types of data I am working with. Given that the title of the map specifically seeks to represent everyday life, I find that finding newspaper articles which highlight the accomplishments and cultural institutions of the black community to provide a much more comprehensive and accurate depiction of their daily reality and contributions to the city of Harlem. The act of only recording the community’s arrests and criminal charges misrepresents it as a whole.

http://themomacollection.com/Echo/index.html

 

 

The information presented in the Top City Vendors bar graph represents only a slim variability of data types, as there are only three available: vendor title, dollar amount, and fiscal year. Records in this case are categorized squarely by time and amount.

 

Given that this dataset is one of the most straightforward lists to be found on the LA Controller’s site, I find its simplification to be indicative of many of the social and administrative problems apparent in all the respective datasets located on this site. We can view each of these datasets as not necessarily reflecting the biases of Ron Galperin, Los Angeles City Controller, but of the Los Angeles government as a whole, whose organization of Los Angeles’ funds is an opaque and mysterious affair.

 

As was already mentioned by my classmates, the data available in these sets are only readily accessible to the administrative elite or politically savvy; and I mean this in the sense that while this information is publically available, its precise and detailed information is kept guarded by bureaucracy and privileged knowledge.

 

For example, knowing that the city treasurer spent $501,200,595.00 in 2015 tells me nothing about what that money was actually spent on, leaving me, as a citizen of Los Angeles, in the dark about the administrative processes that deal with this city’s funding.
In remembering that Wallack and Srinivasan describe ontology as being any organization of differing variables based on a group’s common perception of knowledge, I believe it is safe to say that this information is organized for the benefit of those who are processing the data in the first place, which are Los Angeles city officials. This type of data organization privileges those already in an elite position, so I believe it is ineffective as a dataset meant for the civil population.

 

The Finding Aid for the Virgina Espino and Renee Tajima-Pena Collection of Sterilization Records covers the court records of 10 Latina women in Los Angeles circa 1975 – 1979 who sued the Los Angeles County – University of Southern California Medical Center for malpractice on the grounds of racial discrimination: namely their coerced sterilization.

 

This finding aid collection was donated to the UCLA Research Center for Chicano Studies in 2013 by both Virginia Espino and Renee Tajima-Pena, who were conducting personal research at UCLA at the time.

 

While the finding aid does not provide explicit information on the how the malpractice physically occurred, one may infer from the sparse descriptions of each court document that E. J. Quilligan, M.D. (an obstetrician), may have been treating these women in preparation for childbirth. Given that an obstetrician is directly involved in the process of a planned or current pregnancy, the lawsuit against Quilligan takes a decidedly malicious turn, as his primary role as caregiver is to provide guidance in the prenatal stage, as opposed to the abortion or nullification of a pregnancy through coerced sterilization.

 

Whether or not these women were tricked into sterilization or were simply brute-forced remains unclear in the finding aid’s accounts. That additional information may be retrieved by combing over the photocopied court documents themselves, in addition to audio recordings. These documents may be accessed by contacting the Southern Regional Library Facility at UCLA (where they are currently stored) or sending a research inquiry to the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. However, these documents are currently unavailable online and the documents have been tagged as “unavailable for research”.

 

In closing, it is safe to say that these documents tell the narrative of systemic racism against Hispanic American women present in the USC Medical branch during the 1970’s, and paints a picture of abuse that may have very well expanded to many women beyond the 10 victims who came forward in this litigation. These records also address the reproductive rights of women and implies the emotional and physical damage caused by involuntary sterilization. Furthermore, questions of civil rights and women’s rights are underscored in this case, as the malicious malpractice of Doctor Quilligan clearly sets an example for the unlawful and unethical disregard for such basic human liberties.
It is also worth mentioning that the scope of these documents only cover the course case of the 10 women who stepped forward, and does not include the many other Latina women who were implied to have been harmed by Quilligan’s racial discrimination. The only way, in my mind, that this additional documentation may possibly be retrieved lies in the feasible cross-reference between this database and others within the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center of medical documents in the 1970’s that deal with Latina healthcare at USC.

 

Inventing Abstraction is an interactive historical web project that elaborates upon the vast network of artists, musicians, choreographers, and poets who contributed to the birth of abstraction — a radical element of modern art  that was critical in the development of post-modernism. As a supplementary web document to the Inventing Abstraction exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this illustrated network of artists serves as additional context for the curatorial statement, which names a few key players in the 1910’s and 20’s whose relationships formed this conceptual movement.

This web project features the following sources, processes, and presentations:

Sources (assets): Scans (images) of original paintings, drawings, scores, and books are included in this web of artists, in addition to copious amounts of background text (such as birthplace, affiliated studios, interests, and short bios). Each artist’s node in the interactive web map has additional links which describe in detail the production, inspiration, and conceptual trajectory of selected works from their careers, in addition to mp3’s of their compositions (if musical). There also exists a PDF checklist of all work included on the site.

Process (services): The home page of the website is embedded deep within the MoMA website infrastructure, nestled within the interactive exhibition folders circa 2012. The direct link provided by this class to this web page is convenient, as it simplifies the visitor’s ease of access. The network diagram of artists featured on this website is the main point of interest, and offers a minimal amount of interactivity via clicking on the nebulous, bobbing nodes, which then link the visitor to additional information about each artist. This complex node network system was made possible by the design company Second Story in collaboration with MoMA’s curatorial and design team. Upon further inspection of the html code, one will find that the node network uses a google analytics node script, which offers the visitor a dynamic and accurately linked experience at which they may explore each artist’s web buried within the larger network infrastructure.

 
Presentations (display): This site utilizes general design motifs and color schemes that mimic those of the Bauhaus style, which was an experimental art school (1919 – 1933)  placed at the latter half of the timeline focused on in the Inventing Abstraction exhibition (1910 – 1925). The layout of the node network page is generous and avoids any claustrophobic pitfalls of a cramped page that tries to fit too much into the window at one time; whenever a node is selected, the network narrows in size and focuses on a much smaller web of related individuals to give the subsequent text room to breathe.