Author: gretchenkiep

Using three-dimensional technologies to create content and taking anything that exists in reality and creating it in a virtual reality is an incredible concept. Consider the evolution of video games. Remember some of the earlier video games like Pong or Snake? The player in Pong would make sure the black dot on the screen, or the Ping-Pong ball, hit the black stick, or the Ping-Pong paddle, every time the ball neared the edge of the screen. The game Snake consisted of a long pixelated “snake” that continuous chased different dots to eat them and then the snake would grow longer. Disregarding the fact that my explanations of these early video games are poor, make sure you consider the video games that exist today. Not that I am an expert, but the quality and user experience of these virtual games are high quality and complex in comparison to older games like Pong and Snake.

Video games are just one of the many uses for vitual reality technologies. After Favro referred to the UCLA Urban Simulation Team (UST) in her “Meaning in Motion” essay, I found the UCLA UST website and started to explore. Urban simulation can be useful for many reasons. For instance, UCLA UST uses computer modeling to create large-scale urban environments. Their main project is the creations of a real time virtual model of the entire Los Angeles basin. Searching through their website I found a short simulation and screen shots of simulations of different places in Los Angeles. They have many screen shots of a UCLA simulation, which I was most impressed with. It is extremely accurate in design and appearance. The simulations are so accurate that the graffiti on the walls and different signs throughout the city are legible.

The UCLA UST’s designs are not just used for appearance and virtual entertainment. In fact, their designs are used for community governance and emergency response in Los Angeles. The simulations are also used to understand Los Angeles transportation in real time and the different methods of traveling from Point A to Point B in Los Angeles.

http://www.ust.ucla.edu/ustweb/projects.html

User experience is very important when it comes to digital media. The users need to be able to navigate and understand exactly how the media works.. You want the user to feel connected to the information being presented. I felt connected to the Freedom’s Ring animation because of the moving graphics along with the text and recording of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech.” The animation is not difficult to navigate. Instead, it allows the users to interact with the material by listening, to the speech, watching the graphics, and viewing the text. The graphics add another dimension of portrayal to users because it allows the users to visualize the speech on the screen. I like how the animation is user friendly but also portrayed in a creative way.
I think of Amazon.com as a user friendly website. It is navigable and easy to use, however, it is more of a commercialized website. Obviously since Amazon is a business, it is trying to attract and appeal to customers. I did not notice the similar structure each commercialized website has. It is amazing to think that because many of websites feature similar layouts that we become so used to this specific layout. I do not think twice about where the search bar should be or where to click to find the main menu. It has become part of my instincts to look at the top of the website for the search bar, the most logical location, but it is interesting how it is expected from the users like myself to always have a search bar towards the top of the webpage. The reason the Freedom’s Ring animation stood out to me because it did not have the typical structure of a website, instead it offered a more creative approach to presenting historical information. I was more interested in the creative text and animation Freedom’s Ring presentation in comparison to the everyday typical website structure.

I am intimidated of web mapping because I feel as though I am inexperienced with many technologies and software, however, web mapping comes across as a very important yet complex part of the digital world. I really enjoyed the presentation of Alan McConchie and Beth Schechter’s, “Anatomy Of a Web Map,” because it was very interactive. The way McConchie and Schecter broke down the aspects of web mapping through large and colorful font PowerPoint slides made it somewhat easier to understand. I also liked how they compared web maps to bodies and the cells of bodies to data in web mapping.

In terms of the presentation and my intimated feelings towards web mapping I learned that tiles were revolutionary in the history of web mapping and that there is a difference between the original MapQuest Maps and Google Maps. Web Maps are viewed in a browser or the Internet like Open Street Map or Google Maps (both browsers use tiles). MapQuest did not use tiles, which made it difficult to view the maps on the Internet. Tiles allow for maps to load faster than a big map. As zoom levels increase on maps the number of tiles increases exponentially.

One of the web mapping sites that stood out to me was OpenStreetMap because anyone can use it for mapping. It is comparable to Wikipedia as a search engine but for web mapping. There is a community of mappers that use OpenStreetMap to map roads, trails, highways, railways, etc. all over the world. When I searched my small two square mile town in New Jersey I found that it was mapped along with all the roads and city boundaries. I could even access how long ago it was mapped and who mapped it. I think this is very impressive website especially because it is web map community driven. Even though it may not be perfectly reliable, it allows for people to practice web mapping and build off of other mapper’s work.

I did not realize how text analysis could help discover more about the actual subject and perhaps help form an argument or additional conclusion about the text. Reading about Andrew Smith’s commentary on the Criminal Intent Project and the text analysis of all the Old Bailey court cases from 1674 to 1913. They analyzed 198,000 trials. Researchers found that beginning in 1825 there was an unusual peak in the number of guilty pleas and short trials, whereas before 1825 most of the trials were full trials in which people did not plea guilty. Researchers also found that the number of men defendants started to outweigh the number of women defendants. These findings helped to advance the understandings of the Old Bailey court cases and helped to gain more insight on the changes in the history of court cases in London.

Until I was exposed to text analysis in Digital Humanities and did a little more research on the background of text analysis tools like Voyant I did not realize how helpful of a tool it is. Reading about some background information, I learned that Voyant credits some of its textual analysis skills towards Google because like many other search engines Google focuses on search and retrieval of text content. It also references how Google sets a “standard for simplicity in interface” when browsing the default search page. Now compare the default search page of Voyant to Google and how the Voyant search page includes one box to begin text analysis. I recognized that Voyant and Google are similar in the aspect of simplicity because of the inclusion of a single search box. I did not think of Google, something I use everyday, as a type of text analysis. Learning more about the process of analyzing text and how it can lead to retrieving new texts or formulating new arguments has been useful for my DH project research. Text analysis is something I hope to use more of throughout my research projects.

http://docs.voyant-tools.org/context/background/

The Invisible Australians website caught my attention because of the way it is presented and the data that is presented on it. The invisible people of Australia or the colored people of Australia in the early 1900s living through the White Australia Policy were discriminated against and forgotten about. The message of this website is to document these people who were denied their place as Australians.

The about page mentions that it is all about the people, hence the opening page portrays the faces of the invisible Australian people. When you click on the faces the document of a certificate documenting their ‘temporary’ exit from the Commonwealth of Australia.

After reading the about page and searching the home page the message becomes more clear that the point of this browser is to acknowledge the existence of the people who once were not acknowledged as Australians because of the color of their skin.  One of the researchers that created this database, Tim Sherratt mentioned that it was important that he did not “re-imprison” these people as non-white non-Australians.

This database reminded me of a portrait project known as The Memory Project (http://www.memoryproject.org/index.php). The Memory Project’s mission is to provide the youth from around the world who have been “neglected, orphaned, or disadvantaged” with portraits created by art students. They send photographs of children to art teachers around the world and then art students create a portrait of these children, which are then delivered to these children. The website shows some examples of the portraits, which reminded me of the Invisible Australian website’s emphasis of the people and the faces.

Both the Invisible Australian website and The Memory Project focus on documenting the people and acknowledging their existence. Videos on the memory project website show children from underprivileged areas thanking the art students for the portraits saying that it is nice to know that “there are more people in this world who love us.” These projects allow us to remember history and the importance that any human can have on history. The Invisible Australian project analyzes humanity in the 1900s but also allows for people to reflect on humanity today and the importance of people all over the world.

Michael Christie’s article, “Databases and Aboriginal Knowledge,” brings up an important point that technology has become so important in categorizing and providing people with information from databases and internet sources; however, not all cultures are exposed or a part of this collection of information using technology phenomenon. Christie discusses a few Larrakia women’s desires to preserve the knowledge of their elders through digital technology. They have concern that the children of the Larrakia community do not want to learn anything from their elders. Perhaps technology is the only way to pass down aboriginal knowledge of tradition and identity to the Larrakia youth.

It is interesting to me that those few women from the Larrakia community seemed so willing to expose their culture to technology and potentially become more involved in the technological world. But then I asked though about it how else does one store and collect information in an extremely efficient and accessible way? It makes sense to consider making a database with information for the Larrakia youth and community, but the issue is that is could take away from the methods of literacy and discourse in preserving their identity.

This article reminded me of my experience with a nomadic tribe in Tanzania. During my trip in Africa, the school group I was with ventured off into the mountains of Tanzania at 3:00 a.m. to find a tribe. Since this tribe is nomadic it is extremely difficult to locate and track their whereabouts. We picked up a civilian from a random village along the way who was our guide to find this tribe. He grew up in a village in the mountains, and when he played in the mountains of Tanzania as a child he stumbled upon this tribe. He continued to venture into the mountains and secretly learn about this tribe and their language. Not many people know about their existence or understand their culture. My guide told us he was one of the very few who understood their ways of life because he grew up interacting with them. He explained that the tribe struggles to exist because of the issues of incest and their youth dying from birth defects. He also explained how they regard marijuana as something with that provides strength and spiritual value. They hunt for all of their food and often get sick from certain diseases found in wild African animals. The culture obviously has different values to those of western values, but the idea that their tribe is slowly dwindling and has the potential to become extinct with very little knowledge of their identity is extremely unfortunate.

Aboriginal knowledge is something that should be regarded as more important and collected in certain ways. I believe that technology can provide cultures with the resources to store information about tradition and identity. I think it is unfortunate that the Larrakia women feel that they do not have much choice but to start using digital technology to preserve their culture. However, I also find it unfortunate that cultures like the nomadic tribe in Tanzania do not have resources to preserve their culture. It is difficult to say what the right thing for indigenous cultures is to do in order to pass down their knowledge, but it is a matter of if they are willing to change their processes of discourse and literacy in order to hop on to the technology train.

After reading Alexis Madrigal’s article, “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood,” it made me even more interested in the human work and technological software used to classify, or in this case, microtag information on the internet. I did not know what tagging or micotagging data on the Internet consisted of. The thing that interested me the most was that Netflix altered the system of tagging and microtagging by going deeper into the content of the movies featured on the website. In order to gain more content-based information and make the Netflix experience personal, Netflix’s Vice President of Product, Todd Yellin, and a Netflix crew used a mix of human and machine intelligence to create the Netflix Quantum Theory system of tagging movies and shows. The idea of combining both human and machine intelligence for a more powerful system reminds me of the book, The Singularity Is Near, written by computer scientist, futurist, and inventor, Ray Kurzweil.

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist, or in his terms, a Singulatarian. In his book he explains this theory of the Singularity. The Singularity is Near defines the term Singularity as “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” Kurzweil’s idea of the Singularity emphasizes the emergence of transhumanism through technological advancements in society, which will create such immense progress in technology that it will lead to the transcendence of humanity to a post-human race.

Obviously the Netflix Quantum Theory is not as extreme as Ray Kurzweil’s theory of the Singularity; however, Yellin’s system of combining human and machine intelligence is comparable to Kurzweil’s theory of transformation from a human intelligent society into a machine intelligent society. Kurzweil thinks in order to become the most intelligent and successful society that the human race must combine with machine technology and then later transform to a post-human machine intelligent society. Technology like Netflix’s Quantum Theory system is constantly improving and becoming more personable to the people using these technologic devices. Yes, Netflix is not capable of taking over the human race, but the Quantum Theory is learning to ‘outsmart’ consumers by categorizing information of consumer interests in a way that manipulates the consumers to continue to watch Netflix movies and shows. After gaining an understanding for Netflix’s Quantum Theory, Madrigal even said, “But if Netflix’s system didn’t already exist, most people would probably say that it couldn’t exist either.” Who knows what boundaries of technology, in this case, categorizing and tagging data will be broken? A tagging system like Netflix has just added to this whirlwind of out-of-the-box yet logical systems and can only improve from the systems that exist today.

Works cited:
Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Print.

Sperberg-McQueen’s “Classification and its Structures,” made me realize that grouping subjects based on specific properties is not as simple as it seems. Classifying a field is a complex task because of the many details and rules accounted for when distinguishing properties of the object being classified. I have always thought of classifying as a process of identifying the “odd” object out of a group and then disregarding it as an object that should not be classified in that specific group. However, I did not take into account the many rules of classification. It is difficult to classify fields because many are often classified as n-dimensional spaces, which means such a system includes “increasingly fine distinctions” of subfields. For example, the Dewey Decimal Classification system includes many smaller subclasses that branch off from larger classes. Sperberg-McQueen referred to the success of the classification within the Dewey Decimal System more than once.

Sperberg-McQueen’s journal made me think of the father of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, and his first famous publication. According to online article “Systema Naturae- an epoch making book,” Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, written in latin, classifies the animal, stone, and plant kingdoms, which were fairly new to the classification world in 1735. He used a system known as binomial nomenclature, which in some form is used today and gives species a two-part name in order to classify them into different genus and species. Linnaean’s works of classification led to greater discoveries and millions of improvements within the rules of not only the classification of organisms, but also the classification of any object.

Classification systems are necessary in order to organize and then further understand information. Online classification systems and archives can be taken for granted in society. Many people forget about the work involved in creating any form of organized records especially when it comes to the Internet. Since the Internet is something that society relie on, more classification systems and archives are needed for online management and hopefully will not be taken for granted.

Works Cited:

“Systema Naturae – an Epoch-making Book.” Linné On Line. Ed. Roland Moberg. Uppsala Universitat, 2008. Web. Oct. 2014.