Author: Edgar Trujillo

While reading Natalia Cecire’s “Introduction: Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities,” my attention was piqued when she mentioned hacks. At the very beginning of her introduction, she states that “The debates around the role of ‘theory’ in digital humanities are debates about the relationship between saying and doing.” The theory is the “saying” and for “doing,” she brings up hackers as an example, referring to Stephen Ramsay who says that “…a hacker is a person who looks at systemic knowledge structures and learns about them from making or doing.” He describes hackers as people who see the data and the information and make something new from it.

If you haven’t picked up the hints in some of my previous blog posts, I’m into playing Pokemon games and if you’ve never played any of their main series games, I’ll give you a brief explanation of them. At the beginning of each game, you are introduced to the professor of the particular region that the game takes place in in the Pokemon world and after getting a short explanation of the creatures that inhabit the world and choosing whether you are a boy or girl (not optional in Generation 1) and selecting a name, you dive right in. After selecting your starter Pokemon, you travel throughout the region, catching and training Pokemon, collecting each badge of the eight gyms in the region, defeating the evil team of that region, and challenging the Elite Four and the Champion. There are other things you can do in the games, especially now that there are Wi-Fi battles and downloadable content, but you’re obviously not buying the newest installment to the series expecting there to be anything different from what I described above.

So now that you know the gist of the main series Pokemon games, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, so don’t the fans get bored with the same old-same old?” That’s very reasonable to think but as Griffin McElroy from the Polygon, “Despite the truly gargantuan amount of time demanded by the core series, there are fans who demand more — and fans who create more.” McElroy is talking about the ROM Hacks that can be found all over the internet. These hacks are simply altered versions of the original games. Some are completely new spins on old stories while others aren’t that much different. Some are just more difficult versions of the originals which can consist of altering the levels of your opponent’s Pokemon or even changing their Pokemon to make their teams more well rounded. A link can be found below which has downloadable hacks of games that were made for the Game Boy Advanced if anyone is interested in venturing them. Overall, I feel like despite the original work is not theirs, the ability to create a polished game that you can call your own is an incredible talent. Besides, the PokeTubers that play some of these games on their channels aren’t complaining.

Works Cited

http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/introduction-theory-and-the-virtues-of-digital-humanities-by-natalia-cecire/

http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/22/6054087/pokemon-fan-games-hacked-roms

http://wesleyfg.weebly.com/pokeacutemon-hack-rom-gba.html

Reading “Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface,” I understood the rules as sort of commandments for basic user interface that every website should use if they want to see good results. To assess each of these rules, we’ll take a look at a website known as sharkrobot.com, which sells shirts, hoodies, posters, keychains, wallets, hats, and books. About a month ago, the youtuber that I mentioned in a previous blog post, natewantstobattle, hosted a charity stream on Youtube in which he would play either Pokemon X and Y or Super Smash Brothers for the Nintendo 3DS with viewers. Aside from all the good fun, Nate was selling a T-shirt called Zoroark’s Cove (which can be seen below) through Shark Robot just for that one day and all of the profits that he made from it went to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The reason he did this was because a childhood friend of his introduced him to video-games but unfortunately died to Leukemia around the age of twelve and Nate felt bad that he could not thank his friend for his success because that exposure to the video-game world is what led to the creation and rise of his channel. Hearing this, I supported the charity stream by buying the shirt (which I received but the size was too small so I sent it back and am currently waiting for anew one) from Shark Robot.

At the time, I just visited sharkrobot.com to buy the shirt, but after reading “Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface,” I decided to see how each of those rules is put into play here. The reason why I chose this website is that I feel like shopping websites satisfy the fourth rule the best. If you can find another example that uses the third rule, let me know. Anyway, the first rule strive for consistency, is very straightforward and goes back to when Miriam was talking about controlled vocabulary. The second rule says that an interface should enable frequent users to use shortcuts which I cannot really see on Shark Robot, but to be fair I can’t think of another example from the top of my head and perhaps I have not explored the website enough to know whether it provides shortcuts for frequent users. Next is offering informative feedback which I can testify for seeing as how I gave the website feedback about one of my orders because a week and four days had passed before the shirt arrived at my house. The fourth rule, which was mentioned above states that the interface should design dialogue to yield closure. The way I understand this rule, there should be a beginning, middle, and end action and the best example I could think of for this is the process of buying something over the internet. Depending on the website there will be a different amount of steps but all of them ask for personal information and credit card information.

The fifth rule is offer simple error handling and from what I’ve seen, there aren’t any errors on the website. Rule number six says to permit easy reversal actions which I cannot really see but again, I haven’t explored the website enough to encounter it. Next is support internal locus of control and everything seems fine in this department. There aren’t annoying pop-ups or imposing features. The final rule states reduce short-term memory load which is also in order because the pages are stable and links do not open other pages. Overall, this website seems to follow these basic rules.

When I read about the types of web maps in Jim Detwiler’s “Introduction to Web Mapping,” I thought about each one and thought back to my project. Because I’m researching Earthquakes, the majority of my still images will be maps so I found this article very useful especially when Detwiler explains static web maps. Static web maps are basically digital versions of paper maps so they are usually digital scans of the physical copy.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/central_america/gshap.php

The map above is a representation of the level of seismic hazard in each region of Central America. The areas marked in brown are the most vulnerable to seismic activity followed by the  areas marked in red because of where their faults lie. Below is another map that shows all of the plates that compose the Earth’s crust and vibrate, causing seismic activity. The plates are all labelled and the green arrows indicate the direction that they are traveling in. The purple lines indicate the borders of the plates but the choppy areas are the subduction zones where the plate sinks in below its neighboring plate.

http://www.maps.com/ref_map.aspx?pid=12871

This subduction is what has caused the largest earthquakes in recorded history like the 1960 Chile Earthquake. Notice that in the second map, there is a subduction zone right along Chile’s coast meaning it is vulnerable to large earthquakes seeing as how they were hit hard twice: once in 1960 and again in 2010.

Each individual map focuses on a certain aspect of seismic activity, the first one concentrating specifically on which areas in Central America are most vulnerable while the second showing the borders and directions of the tectonic plates. Separately, these maps give us useful information but together, they show a larger picture and give us an understanding that they cannot convey alone. Aside from not being able to zoom in and out of these maps and move around on them, these static web maps can only offer a certain amount of information and nothing more. Unlike interactive web maps that allow you to input data to see certain trends, static web maps are “what you see is what you get” meaning that there usefulness is very limited. In no way are static web maps bad but they are definitely limited in their usefulness and require multiple maps to display the bigger picture. This is merely a minor inconvenience, however because you have to search for multiple maps but overall, they can get the point across.

Works Cited

http://www.livescience.com/43220-subduction-zone-definition.html

While reading “Demystifying Networks Part 1 of n: An Introduction,” I noticed that Scott Weingart mentioned Google’s PageRank as an example for a directed edge. I followed along with what he said when explaining that directed edges were relationships in which “…you cannot switch out Node1 for Node2.” Weingart uses authors and books in his demonstration showing that the connection between the first node (an author) and the second node (the book) is that the author writes the book. It would be silly to say that the book writes the author so these terms cannot be switched. How does with relate to Google?

Google’s PageRank uses an algorithm that ranks sites based on how many visits and links there are to the site. In Manipulability of PageRank under Sybil Strategies, Alice Cheng and Eric Friedman use a term, sybil, which can be described as when “a single user creates several fake users […] who are able to link to (or perform false transactions with) each other and the original user” allowing the websites that the real user wants to gain popularity to do so. One of the girls that works at the psychiatrist’s office that I intern in told me that at a previous job she worked in, the company had about four laptops solely for that purpose of increasing the number of times their website was visited.

So the first pages that appear when you search for something on Google are the ones that are most visited and linked to, right? Not exactly. Above is a screenshot I took when entering “Beverly Hills Psychiatrist” and these are the results I got. What I was searching for when I typed in “Beverly Hills Psychiatrist” was actually the website for the psychiatrist I intern for, “drsolution.net”, which appeared right below the results shown above and only appeared on the map when zoomed in. Notice that all seven of the results in the screenshot are partnered with Google leading me to believe that the largest determinant in the algorithm is money. I decided to check how these websites rank globally on “alexa.com”, which ranks all of the websites in the world based on how many visits they get. From the seven results in the screenshot, only two have websites separate from Google so I searched them both on Alexa and compared the results to “drsolution.net” and found that “bowmanmedicalgroup.com” ranked higher than Dr. Solution did but “www.beverlyhillspsychiatry.net” was so low that it did not even have a rank leading me to confirm my suspicions that money is a huge factor in who shows up first in the listings.

Works Cited

http://www.cs.duke.edu/nicl/netecon06/papers/ne06-sybil.pdf

http://www.scottbot.net/HIAL/?p=6279

http://www.sodahead.com/living/what-race-are-you/question-1919271/?link=ibaf&q=&esrc=s

Race is a classification system that has affected many people simply because of their skin color or country of decent. “Invisible Australians” states that early twentieth century Australia identified itself as a white man’s country and enacted discriminatory laws and policies against the non-European people that lived there. These people were basically denied their place as Australians.

“The Real Faces of White Australia” shows faces of men of non-European decent, people who lived in Australia but faced discrimination because of their skin color. A link is provided below and if you click on one of the portraits, you will find a record stating that that individual was forced to leave Australia for a certain number of years (most said three) and if they returned before that time finished, they would face consequences. Could you imagine being forced to leave the country you call home just because of the way you look or your decent? Even in recent years, people here face forms of discrimination based on race.

I intern at a psychiatrist’s office and one of the young ladies that works there is mixed Black and Guatemalan so as a child, she hated answering what gender she was when it came to school forms because of one time when she marked herself as Hispanic, resulting in the school placing her in a class for children who spoke English as a second language. She ended up having to take a test to prove that she could speak English fluently. Her school functioned with the notion that race defined whether she spoke English fluently or not.

People of mixed decent are not as uncommon as they were ten years ago making it seem like the notion of race is outdated, and for the most part, it is except for when it comes to a person’s health. Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Gene, Race, and Disease says that “The human population is not homogeneous in terms of risk of disease. Indeed, it is probably the case that every human being has a uniquely defined risk, based on his/her inherited (genetic) constitution…” In this sense, it is important to categorize people based on their decent because of health risks that may have been passed down by an allele. Categorization does have its negatives because of the social impacts that it can have on a group of individuals, but it does have its use and purpose for protecting them as well.

Work Cited

http://invisibleaustralians.org/

http://invisibleaustralians.org/faces/

http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/gb-2002-3-7-comment2007.pdfThat

This morning, I turned on my laptop, went to my folder labeled “Fall 2014,” clicked on another folder, “Astronomy 3” and finally opened a word document file named “Ast 3 Lec 10-24-14” to reviews my notes from the last Astronomy 3 lecture that I went to. It’s so easy for the average person to create a database, no matter how small, and store their files on their computers. The internet makes this even easier by letting us post texts, pictures, videos, etc. on an open space where others can view them with the click of their mouse.

Databases are helpful in many ways, especially when it comes to immortalizing historical texts. In Computer Databases and Aboriginal Knowledge, Michael Christie talks about the aboriginal population Larrakia from Darwin, The Northwestern Territory in Australia and how some of their women want to put their elder’s knowledge onto a database so that the younger generations can have that information even after the elders pass. With youth now constantly on their devices whether it be a phone, laptop, or tablet, they are constantly being fed information through websites like the Yahoo home page, social networks, and plain research so it makes perfect sense to put the Aboriginal elders’ knowledge on databases that the younger generations can access.

Databases are essentially virtual archives which can be derived from the Greek word “Arkhe” and defined as the “commencement” and the “commandment” as described in Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.  As the commencement, archives describe nature and history as the origin where things commence. As the commandment, they show how men command because archives are a man-made creation. When looking at archives with these two principles, we can truly appreciate their importance and creation. By applying this to the Aboriginals from Darwin, we can see the significance in inputting their elder’s knowledge into a database.

The Aboriginal’s can create a database for their children and grandchildren and they’ve done their job when it comes to bringing them the information. The old saying “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” comes into play here. If the children do not show interest in using the database to learn about their history and culture, then that is their choice. The real magic happens when someone reads the information and uses it or tells someone else about it. Text is nothing more than text until someone reads it. At that point, it becomes knowledge that someone can use by teaching and using that information. Databases are great because they offer us information that we can tell others about.

Works Cited

http://www.cdu.edu.au/centres/ik/pdf/CompDatAbKnow.pdf

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=6KNJmNkE11UC&oi=fnd&pg=PA4&dq=archive+fever&ots=lrKZ2mSmXe&sig=CIde5g-wdIhhSFQIxgXcj9aZzWE#v=onepage&q=archive%20fever&f=false

• http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/5/

I define art as any creation that reflects something about the artist or creator whether it be an interest, a feeling, a fact about their life, their dreams, etc. Art can be a painting, a film, a book, or even a drawing that you give your mother for mother’s day. Just the concept of using resources around you to create something that, without you, would not exist is impressive to me.

While reading Alexis Mardigal’s article on The Atlantic named “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood,” I found myself intrigued and amazed by his quest to make a list of all the altgenres (a term Madrigal uses to describe the various genres found on Netflix) that the streaming service has to offer. However, there was one sentence that caught my eye in which he describes a conversation between himself and Todd Yellin, Netflix’s VP of Product. Madrigal says, “‘It’s a real combination: machine-learned, algorithms, algorithmic syntax,’ Yellin said, ‘and also a bunch of geeks who love this stuff going deep.'” I also have a definition for geeks: anyone who is very passionate about something whether it be movies, video-games, data, or any other field of interest.

This quote resonated with me, reminding me of a conversation I had with one of my friends a few days ago when I showed him a video on Youtube by a Poketuber (someone who makes videos about the media franchise, Pokemon), Nathan Smith, who goes by the name of “natewantstobattle.” Smith has over 200,000 subscribers on Youtube which he has garnered through his “Let’s Plays” and song parodies. Below is one of his parody videos called “Hoenn’s Out,” based on the song “Love Runs Out” by American pop band OneRepublic.

Smith’s song, “Hoenn’s Out” talks about the excitement Pokemon fans felt upon hearing that Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were confirmed for the Nintendo 3DS family of systems. Smith has used what many would call a “geeky” interest to create these parody videos that many people enjoy listening to and watching. Other Youtube users leave comments expressing how they feel about his parodies. Here are a few:

TyranitarTube: “I’m gonna jam to this as I drive to BestBuy in November.”

Taylor Nordman: “I heard the original song for the first time today, and in comparison to this, I thought it sucked.”

Blaze The Mincraftian: “Cant stop listening to this song.”

When Yellin mentioned the people who watched the movies for Netflix to stream and rated the movies based on violence, the level of romance, etc. to create altgenres for Netflix, he described people who were passionate about the subject and committed to doing the work. Even Madrigal, who followed road they left behind by giving each genre a certain title, was passionate enough about creating a list and data to work until the it was complete. Whether you call these people geeks in a good way or a bad way, I call them artists for creating something they believe in.