Author: christineholland

I had the pleasure of having Diane Favro as my professor for History of Architecture and Urban Design 10A last winter quarter. She incorporated both her work and her student’s work with 3D modeling of ancient architectural sites throughout the course to help explain the design and function of each place. I think having these models to learn from as a student made it easier to understand the purpose and function of these ancient sites and visualize how the people of the time would actually live in them. For example, I still remember her digital model of Karnak, an ancient Egyptian temple and holy site. She was able to visually walk us through the temple and explain the significance of each room, right down to the details of the carvings on the wall. When we went online to explore this model ourselves, we could explore the changes that occurred to the structural site as time passed. In addition to using 3D modeling in lectures, we had a series of projects to complete throughout the quarter that introduced us to geographic and 3D modeling of our own. One of the projects required us to use one of UCLA’s 3D visualizations of Pompeii to create a walk-through narrative of a citizen’s last day before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Having my story actually move through the city added an entirely new dimension to my project that I have never been able to achieve before. When I visited Italy this past summer, I was lucky to have the chance to visit Pompeii and easily navigate the same route I had plotted in my project, seeing the ruins that the setting of my story became in real life. It was also fascinating having the knowledge of what the actual Pompeii structures probably looked like before the eruption, then looking at the ruins themselves and imagining them with this image in mind.

Having this first-hand experience with 3D modeling has shown me how it can not only enhance Digital Humanities projects, but help one understand and remember the material in a much simpler way. 3D modeling opens doors to new questions that could not have been asked before by giving the viewer a new perspective of an ancient site or object. We can receive a better picture of what a person’s life was like in these ancient civilizations As Favro says, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, an interactive 3D simulation is worth tens of thousands.”

After reading Shneiderman’s “Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design”, I was immediately reminded of the shortcomings of my online Spanish course. Half of the class I am enrolled in this quarter exists online, with online tutorials and lectures, homework assignments, and study guides. However, I constantly find myself frustrated with the layout of the website, as the location of certain things within the site is not the most intuitive. I have to waste so much time just trying to find certain parts of the website in order to complete my work, when it could be much more streamlined and time efficient. I have decided to compare Shneiderman’s rules to my Spanish course website and see if its shortcomings can be attributed to the breakage of them. The following rules are broken:

(One can only see the website if you are enrolled in the class, so I have provided a screenshot of the page a student spends most of their time on [but ironically is NOT the homepage] to hopefully better understand what I am talking about.)

1 – The website is not consistent with the way it words it’s items. For example, I can reach certain tutorials under the “Tutorials” tab on the bar, but not all tutorials are listed there. To view others, you have to go under “Course Materials” and then try and remember what specific chapter your question falls under, then look under that file in order to find the rest of them. This splitting of all tutorials makes it very difficult when searching for help on something specific.

2 – There is no opportunity for the user to create shortcuts to best suit his need. He has to go through a few pages in order to reach the homework section each time, and from there click on the specific activity each time to complete it. There is also no bookmark feature to save helpful tutorials to review again. You have to go through the painstaking process of searching for it (described above) every time you need it.

3/4 –When completing a homework series, one completes different activities that are independent of each other. Only when every activity is complete is the assignment complete. However, nothing notifies you when you have completed the assignment, so you must constantly go back and check that you did not miss any activity. Also, the activities are designed to be in sequence with each other by building off the tutorials and increasing in difficulty. However, it is up to the individual teacher to assign the sequence of activities, and many times it is inconsistent with how the activities were designed. As a result, the topics of the activities jump around and there is no set beginning, middle, and end.

5/6 – There is a big possibility to make serious error as a user, such as exiting out of an activity before you are done. There is no opportunity to reverse this action once its complete, and therefore you are unfortunately stuck having to do the entire activity again.

Since I am so familiar with the downsides of having a poorly-designed interface, hopefully I can help my group avoid these errors when we design our own!

After reading about web mapping and GIS this week, I again am reminded of the social media app Instagram that I wrote about last week. In addition to being a great example of a social network some people use almost everyday, Instagram also serves as an example of how web mapping has been adapted for the benefit and leisure of these social networks. When the GPS feature is turned on with any smartphone, the phone itself uses the geographic information collected to keep track of where each individual photo was taken. When a person posts a picture on Instagram, the app uses this data to place the picture on a map according to where the data says the image was taken with startling accuracy. For example if you look at my account, you can see all the places I have been in Southern California that I have posted about online. You can tell where I spend most of my time by seeing where the most number of posts come from.

When I zoom in over Los Angeles, and UCLA specifically, you can see exactly where on campus and in Westwood I was when I took the photo and uploaded it to Instagram.

Every time I add a post, a new image appears on the map, thus making this a real-time, dynamic web map that is constantly being expanded.

The adaptation of web mapping for personalized use has proved to be very effective and many examples are now a part of our daily schedule. Google Maps get us to our destination, Find My iPhone helps us track down lost or stolen phones, different calendar apps track down the location of events and lay them out on a map for their user, and Yelp scans local restaurants and rates them based on user reviews and distance from you. However, the application of web mapping for individual use does cross some privacy boundaries of personal privacy. For example, if one were to have their Instagram account public, anyone could look at their personalized picture map and figure out exactly where he or she lived. Helicopter parents have a whole new way of tracking their teens by using the Find My iPhone app to follow their movements 24/7 and looking at the GPS location data attached to their smartphone photos. As with any new technology, boundaries must be set when it is applied to one’s personal life.

After reading this week’s articles about networks, the various social networks I use were the first things to pop up in my mind (probably since I use these almost every day). For example, Instagram is a social network where friends can connect and share pictures with each other. Also, people can follow various celebrities and or favorite business to stay updated on all of their activities they wish to share. The two nodes involved with this social media are the user and their pictures. Thus, Instagram is a bimodal network. These two nodes are connected by an asymmetric edge; the edge in this case being “is the photographer of.” For example, “user A is the photographer of picture B.” However, one cannot switch the two nodes around, as in “picture B is the photographer of user A,” thus the asymmetry of this edge, called a directed edge.

However, Instagram is considered a social network because there are edges not just between user and picture, but between users and other users, other users and pictures, and pictures and other users. Users can connect with other users by following them, in which the second user may choose (or not choose) to follow back. Depending on if the following is reciprocal or not, this edge is either an undirected edge with a symmetric relationship (“user A is following user B” and equally “user B is following user A”) or a directed edge with an asymmetric relationship (“user A is following user B” but not vice versa because user B did not follow user A back). Users can “like” another user’s photo, thus connecting other users with other photos in an asymmetric directed edge (“user B likes user A’s photo”). One user’s photos may have tags of other users in them, connecting photos with different users in another asymmetric directed edge (“user A is tagged in user B’s photo”). From my understanding of what a dense network is (which may or may not be correct), Instagram serves as an example of one. A user and his photos are connected to other users and their photos in multiple edges, linking the social world together through a variety of interwoven relationships. Algorithms can detect trends in connections and put together a string of suggested photos a user may like based on similar connections of the other users they follow. More and more so, social networks are becoming a platform to discover new interests and people to connect with, in addition to connecting to friends and interests one already has.

http://instagram.com

When I read the description behind the website The Real Face of White Australia, it struck me how it explained the shortcomings of their use of a face detection script. While they have tried to weed out most of the inconsistencies, faces of white people have managed to escape their notice. I was eager to see if I could spot one, and sure enough, after a few minutes of scrolling and exploring, I came across a Customs documentation portrait of a white man named Tom Solomon Toby. Even research projects of this extent have deficiencies in their data visualization. The problem does not lie with the data itself, it has to do with the computer’s processing of the data. Like we have learned in class, the world of the humanities is too complex to be completely and fully processed by that of a computer, and this serves as an example of how this issue can transfer into problems with Digital Humanities projects.

This reminded me of what Francesca warned us about in lab on Friday. The data visualization programs we learned about (Many Eyes, Tableau, and Palladio) may not correctly process our data. Therefore, we must be on the lookout for inconsistencies between our data and its visualization, and be prepared to either find a way around it or explain why the irregularities have occurred.

The inconsistencies between an item search on a website and the wide variety of products that come up serve as an example of discrepancies between what is listed in the database and what is represented in the visualization of that data. For example, on Etsy, an online marketplace for independent merchants, when one searches for a “computer case,” many different items pop up. You can see the results for this search here: https://www.etsy.com/search?q=computer%20case&ref=auto1

In addition to actual laptop cases; laptop stickers, messenger bags, cosmetic bags, travel tags, and even a faux-crocodile handbag came up as search results. There is nothing wrong with Etsy’s database; it is the means of processing this data with a search engine to visualize it on its website where problems come into existence. Etsy can use a controlled vocabulary to better streamline the representation of their database with search engines; minimizing the use of ambiguous terms like “computer case” and thus streamlining their searching process. Again, computers process things in a very strategic way that leaves out the potential of processing people’s tendencies for multiple vocabularies and complex ideas.

When I went shopping this weekend with my sister, I didn’t expect to run into a situation that related to my digital humanities studies. After trying on a dress that was too small, I asked the woman in the store if they had the next size up that I could try. Instead of searching through hundreds of racks to find one particular item of clothing, all she had to do was walk over to the computer, scan the barcode on the dress, and up popped a screen that looked much like image here:

The woman located the item on a database and from there, was able to tell me that the store was currently out of stock in that particular size, but it was available to purchase at a few other specific malls close by. When I asked her how much longer the dress was in the larger size, she was able to expand on the item’s details and tell me that exact information.

This store, like many department stores, uses a database to track all the items in its inventory. The rows list individual articles of clothing differentiated by an item number, while the columns contain data about the elements of an article of clothing, such as its manufacturer, its department category, its product sub-category, its size, and its availability. Using a fixed vocabulary for this data, it is easy to keep track of the same types of products without them being separated from each other. I believe this serves as an example of the Relational Model database design, where the different data points can relate to each other in interaction, and entire data sets would not be deleted if other items were. The independence of one item from another is established by the primary key, “a unique value associated with each individual record in a table” according to Ramsay. In the store’s database, the Item # serves as the primary key. When the bar code is scanned on a particular item of clothing, the system reads the code and connects it to the product listed in the database by connecting to its primary key.

After seeing the use of databases in the clothing store, I noticed other instances used throughout my day. Ordering at a fast food restaurant, scanning my Bruin Card to use the dining hall, my iTunes library, and internship search engines are just a few of the many databases I encounter on a day to day basis.

http://www.csharpkey.com/visualcsharp/adonet/forms/deptstore2j.gif

When reading this week’s article about Netflix’s use of metadata and use of categorizing genres, I was struck by the author’s question: “How do you systematically dismember thousands of movies using a bunch of different people who all need to have the same understanding of what a given microtag means?” This inquiry took me back to our discussion in class where we talked about how assigning a category to something implies a belief about that item or an ideology about the world that may not be universally held. If it were up to the viewers to assign the categories, their differences in perspective would therefore yield different interpretations of what the genres should be. The way Netflix was able to address this problem was through establishing a systemized rating system for different parts of movies; in other words, turning to the actual content to speak for itself when choosing a label for it. In this way, many different tangible parts of the movie came together to create a single, specific, and coherent genre for itself. By allowing the content itself to create the categories, the possibility of introspection (when genres tell the viewer not just what they would like, but what kind of things they would like) becomes possible and adds more to the viewer’s discovery of not just movies, but himself in general.

This introspection reminded me of Pinterest’s use of its “Guided Search” feature, described in the article “Pinterest puts metadata to good use with Guided Search” (http://www.techtimes.com/articles/6081/20140425/pinterest-puts-metadata-to-good-use-with-guided-search.htm ). Basically, the system uses user-generated metadata from the titles, comments, and descriptions made on individual pins to classify it with sub-categories that pop up when a user makes a broad search, allowing him or her to choose a more specific search within the broad category if he or she chooses. This use of metadata derived from the actual content of the pin allows users to stumble across subcategories that are actually pertinent to them, instead of being confined to only the website’s broad thirty-two categories. The more tailored your search, the more the system can detect the user’s specific likes, and thus make more suggestions to material it knows they will like. Similar to Netflix, this process also displays introspection in that it shows the user what kind of things they like, not just what they like. This reliance on content to complete the digital categorization of a topic mirrors that of the field of Digital Humanities in general. Our job is to unite human created content with technologically created classification systems to enhance the way we discover, view, and analyze information.

When reading Julia Gaffield’s article “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence: Digging for Lost Documents in the Archives of the Atlantic World”, I was fascinated by the fact that Haiti’s most important historical document had been lost in the archives of another country’s museum for almost the entirety of it’s existence. Gaffield was able to succeed in the hunt for the Declaration while so many others had failed before her because she took a different perspective on the time period of Haiti in the early 1800s. She understood that Haiti was a part of an interconnected web of trans-Atlantic trade which included the exchange of goods, ideas, and people. Therefore, confining the search to Haiti alone would never have allowed the full story to be uncovered. This phenomenon brought my summer trip to Italy to mind. When I visited the ruins of Pompeii, I was surprised to learn about how most of the artifacts had been excavated then shipped off to museums away from the site, or had disappeared altogether. While the most known artifacts still reside close by in Naples, I wondered what else was out there in the world from Pompeii that any tourist in Italy would not get the chance to see. After looking through the Archaeological Superintendence of Pompeii’s online timeline of the history of the excavation (http://www.pompeiisites.org/Sezione.jsp?titolo=History+of+the+excavation+of+Pompeii&idSezione=1003), I realized there was an unimaginable amount of Pompeiian treasures that had been lost to time as excavators had taken undocumented artifacts away from the site since its discovery in 1748. Since then, the southern region of Italy has been occupied by two foreign powers, France and Spain, each of which instituted their own excavation teams and practices at Pompeii. According to the site, during the French occupation, a task force of 1500 men (both civil and military) worked at a fast pace to unearth many of the ruins, but paid little regard to preserving what they unearthed. In 1811, the French marshal and crowned King of Naples Joachim Murat instituted new excavation regulations  to reduce the amount of artifacts removed from the site, showing  that items were being taken away from Pompeii by the workers. His wife, Caroline Bonaparte (Napoleon’s youngest sister) spread the news of the findings of Pompeii all throughout Europe in written letters. Our society today treats the idea of a global network as novel and that our world is experiencing a newfound exchange of goods, cultures, and ideas. While the emergence of the Digital Age has definitely expedited this exchange, the act of sharing in an international network is nothing new. If Haiti’s Declaration of Independence traveled through this network to England in the early 1800s, many priceless artifacts of Pompeii must have made their way to Spain, France, and other parts of the world in the hands of the workers or as a result of the interconnected monarchies of this time period. Luckily for us, the technologies of the Digital Age open doors to missing connections and create the possibility of discovering things that were once thought to be lost in time. Perhaps these tools can one day be used to find some of the missing treasures of Pompeii.