Author: troyeser

For this blog post, I chose to analyze networks and relationships between characters in the Anne Carson play Krapp Hour Act I. Already familiar with the poetry of contemp lit heroine Anne Carson, I thought it would be a ton of fun to work with a literary piece that utilizes absurdity and disorientation to formulate bonds between characters. The play revolves around the talk show “Krapp Hour” — hosted by a figure named Krapp and featuring a slew of celebrity guests. The high profile guest list includes figures like Jack Kerouac and his mother Gabrielle (referred to as ‘Gabe’), who speak about the beat generation, ‘the banana man’, shallow journalism, and a prospective trip to RadioCity later in the day. Characters enter and exit, filtering in and out of scenes with Krapp being the central node tying the network together. Other players enter the scene, such as Martin Heidegger or Henry David Thoreau’s Aunt, Maria. Characters ramble on and on. When not babbling incoherently, readers are offered anecdotes and short stories. For example — the story of the gardener, retold by Aunt Maria, featuring Death and the Princess of Cincinnati. Overall, it was a lot of fun working with such a nonsensical network. I will note that the talk show format easily illuminated most of the relationships between characters. The general format of the work (i.e, the piece being a play) made it easy to comprehend interpersonal interactions and connections between individual figures.

My resulting network graph was:

The Digital Harlem project presents viewers with social, political, and historic information related to Harlem NY between the years 1915-1930. The map on the site is linked to a search toggle, allowing users to probe for particular events, people, and places that have a connection to the map. The Digital Harlem project uses a variety of sources — including District Attorney files, Probation Dept. files, newspapers, as well as a few other publications from the time.

After perusing the site for a bit, I found myself a little confounded by the aims of Digital Harlem. The ‘about’ page states that the creators were invested in developing a project that focused on the banal, or quotidian aspects of early 20th c. Harlem. The developers of the Digital Harlem project believe that discourse surrounding Harlem NY is often arranged in a way that centers the Harlem Renaissance– Black artists and thinkers post-WW1 and pre the Great Depression. This assumption alone is predicated on the Harlem Renaissance as “common knowledge”. With that said, the creators gear their interest towards the Black citizens who lived outside of Black arts movements (and outside solid middle class status).

The project begins by fetching most of its content from legal documents and judicial reports. I go back and fourth with this methodology — part of me is suspicious, why utilize criminal records as your primary source when cultivating an image of “everyday Black life” ? But on the other hand — it’s naive for me to think that everyday Black life in the early 20th c. wasn’t already thoroughly criminalized by the state!! It’s a disturbing thought to reconcile– it’s probably possible to explore avenues of Black sexuality, Black vernacular, or Black hobbies via historic records that perceive such processes as illicit.

The map mixes a number of happenings, such as criminal charges with community festivities. For example, the project allows users to delve into cases of sodomy, while in a separate search a YMCA bowling contest. It’s a big endeavor to try and comprehend how these two events both inform an understanding of the ‘Black everyday’. While the rhetoric of the project is initially alarming (i.e., “charge”, “conviction”, and overwhelmingly negative occurrences), the nuance and complexity of the project is illuminated after a few minutes browsing the various search options. If I were to re-envision an alternative GIS project, I would focus not on alternative sources, but alternative ways of organizing search options and the format of information.

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The ‘Death Dataset’ compares various causes of death, relative to state. All fifty states are featured, and categories of death include the total number of deaths, death by heart failure, cancer, respiratory failure, stroke, accidental death, vehicle death, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, the flu, nephritis, suicide, homicide, and AIDS.

For this data visualization, I’ve chosen to compare rates of suicide vs rates of homicide, varying from state to state. I began by uploading the raw data onto a Google Fusion table, managing to create a very basic column chart. I found this format to be the most feasible for comprehending the data — suicide rates are represented with blue, while rates of homicide are depicted in red. The x and y axis allows for an easy comparison of death tolls relative to state.

While the data visualization allows the viewer to access trends easily — i.e., one may quickly notice that the District of Columbia and Maryland both have greater rates of homicide, vs. greater rates of suicide. I may be lead to make some sort of inference as to why this is — close proximity, similar social circumstances, or etc. With other states visible on the chart, the rate of suicide typically surpass the rates of homicide. My only hesitation with this data vis is related to the raw data itself. There is no annotation for year, and there is no clue offered as to what year (or years) this information was extracted from. Alongside this, the dataset makes it unclear if the information is presented as deaths per state, or death per capita of each state (I highly doubt that total rate of homicide in the state of California is 7 per year?!).

Using the L.A. Controller’s Office website, I was able to access the dataset for Los Angeles Police Expenditures. The dataset includes a myriad of data types, including the ID Number, Fiscal Year, Department Name, Vendor Name, Transaction Date, Dollar Amount, Authority, Business Tax Registration Certificates, Government Activity, Fund Group, Fund Type, Fund Name, Account Name, Transaction ID, Expenditure Type, Settlement / Judgement, Fiscal Month Number, Fiscal Year Quarter, Calendar Month Number, Calendar Month / Year, Calendar Month, Data Source, Authority Name, and Authority Link. The record in this particular dataset is the sum of police expenditures for the city of Los Angeles, spanning June 2011 to January 2014. This sum totals up to nearly 4.9 billion dollars.

Wallack and Srinivasan would go on to describe ontology as ‘the distinct systems of categories and their interrelations by which groups order and manage information about the people, places, and events around them’. By this definition, a particular ontology works to build and enact paradigms within a social demographic and situate knowledge within a community. The Police Expenditures dataset collects and organizes information related to all police expenses and funds. Access to this dataset grants the Los Angeles community some level of clarity in relation to the LAPD. After parsing through this mass amount of data, citizens may develop a better sense of what funds are allocated where, and what gets prioritized by local law enforcement. A benign example being – how much is spent on veterinary funds, vs. how much is spent on training programs.

I found a major pitfall of the dataset to be its ambiguity. The spreadsheet is general and unspecific, pointing often to large monetary units categorized simply as “general funds” or “supplies”. Because of the dataset’s vague format, I’m inclined to believe the information is organized in a way decipherable primarily to those familiar with the rhetoric of L.A. law enforcement bureaucracy. Speaking as an L.A. resident and common citizen, I’m pretty lost on what the expansive term “supplies” might entail. I might be interested in knowing how much the city spends on firearms, vs. how much is spent on body cameras. After moving through such a considerable amount of data, I find myself still a little lost as to what is supposedly being “illuminated” by the data. The dataset seems to offer the facade of accountability– numbers, vendors, years, etc., while in reality revealing nothing citizens probably didn’t already know. If I were to rebuild this dataset, I would format the information in a way that is intuitive and legible to average L.A residents. This might mean specificity, or the creation of new fund and expenditure types. 

The Finding Aid for the Virginia Espino and Renee Tajima-Pena Collection of Sterilization Records is a register provided by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and processed by Angel Diaz. The collection is made up of court records following the 1970s Madrigal v. Quilligan federal class action lawsuit. The Madrigal v. Quilligan lawsuit exposed the coerced sterilization of a number of Latina women by the L.A. County University of Southern California Medical center. The case followed 10 Latina women versus E.J. Quilligan (an M.D.) and other involved obstetricians. The compilation of records span the summer of 1975, up until the spring of 1979. While the judge would ultimately rule against the women, the case would attract public attention and prompt activism related to the forced sterilization of minority and non-English speaking women.

The collection is stored in the Chicano Studies archive, and is made up of two series. The first series features court documents from 1975-1979. The second series includes an oral history of the case, with several audio recordings and cassette tapes. The finding aid for the Virginia Espino and Renee Tajima-Pena Collection functions as an inventory of sorts for the Madrigal v. Quilligan case. The finding aid offers researchers a guide to navigating a potentially esoteric and largely unexplored narrative. The presence of audio recordings and oral reports may offer listeners a personal account of this history– presenting researchers with the individuated and acute details often left out of historic retellings. On the flipside, if I were to utilize only the contents of the finding aid, I may desire a greater historic framework for assessing this singular event. Specifically, how this might relate to the sterilization of Native American women in the 1970s, or the more recent coerced sterilization of California female inmates in the 21st century. To think of the Madrigal v. Quilligan case as an isolated incident would mean denying a profound history of eugenics and forced sterilization of marginalized women in the U.S. Further, if one were to focus exclusively on the contents of the finding aid, the extent of the research would be contained to the number of legal participants and documented cases. I don’t think it would be an error on my part to assume that the infringement upon the reproductive rights of disenfranchised women extends far beyond the 10 women involved in the Madrigal v. Quilligan legal battle. 

The Early African American Film project is an online scholarly database constructed by undergraduate and graduate students apart of the Digital Humanities Program at UCLA. The project aims to build a comprehensive archive of early African American silent race films– the films produced from 1910-1930 for African American audiences. The project collects and organizes information on the early films, actors, production companies, and other components related to this film history. While only a few of these early films survive today, the research work done by the EAAF project and other media scholars helps highlight the importance of this filmmaking community, and how these race films functioned to articulate the narratives of African American identity in the 20th century.

The project pulls content from a number of primary and secondary sources. The Early African American Film database is grounded in records and documents chronicling the films of the era, as well as the people involved. The dataset was formulated using information from major archives, including the George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection, the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum, the UCLA Film and Television Archives, and so on. Central secondary sources include a number of essays and publications examining this moment in Black American film history.

The dataset is made accessible via a downloadable Airtable database embedded on the website. The project also uses Zenodo, a research data repository that allows researchers to deposit datasets online. Zenodo is linked to the software-sharing platform Github, which allows scholarly users to interact, modify, and alter data. Github also works to compile and track the transformation of data, even crediting all contributors.

The content is organized and methodized, materializing in the form of various data visualizations. One such data visualization is the network graph. In the network graph, the circles represent individuals, while lines refer to connections between the individuals. The network graph allows users to visualize associations between actors, directors, producers, and all those involved in a given project. Another visualization tool utilized is the time map. The time map offers a clear depiction of trends seen throughout early African American race film history. This includes where African American production companies were based, the year founded, and etc. The project also features histograms created using plot.ly. The histogram visualization shows the number of race films premiered per year, allowing viewers to note peak years of production, or a decline in output.