Author: brittany.hogan

I work for a company that designs, builds and manages interactive 3D spaces. As our final product is a three-dimensional product, 3D modeling and the newly developing technologies have been incredibly helpful in our planning, designing and building processes. Our detailers use 3D modeling programs to produce drawings that are used across all the teams, but especially by the shop who build the space. We also recently purchased a 3D printer, which allows us to make miniature mockups of spaces or pieces we would like to include in our next project. Because of my limited experience with three-dimensional technology, I had never given much thought to the humanities applications of 3D and virtual reality.

Despite my limited experience, I have realized how many applications there are for Virtual Reality technology. Scholars are already incorporating the technology in to research projects and education: just check out UCLA’s historical modeling projects. As discussed in Virtual Reality for Humanities Scholarship there are many opportunities for those in academia to integrate virtual reality resources and programs in their curriculum. Personally, I am a visual learner, so to be able to see and interact with the environments I am supposed to be learning about would be invaluable. Synder and Freeman argue virtual reality applications could lead to the “possible increase in spatial, scale-related, temporal, and holistic understanding of the represented architectural space over use of static images and two-dimensional drawings”. I couldn’t agree more. Virtual reality mimics your “experience” with the outside world, which tends to make you more engaged while increasing your interaction and absorption of information. Image what classrooms could be like with fully integrated virtual reality programs! Readings could be paired with virtual tours, which could be incorporated with “knowledge checks” throughout the experience. As was concluded in the Meaning in Motion: A Personal Walk Through Historical Simulation Modeling at UCLA : “Digital technologies are open to adaption and redirection, shifting the description from research as a product, to researching as an on-going process, itself giving meaning through motion.” The development and introduction of virtual reality applications will also be an on-going process, and will continue to spread as it is introduced in different market areas.

A fully integrated virtual reality curriculum is looking to be on the horizon, but there are so many other applications for the technology—so it will be interesting to see how it’s first competitively brought to market. Virtual reality and virtual reality devices (like the VR headsets Oculus Rift and Gear VR) have been the talk of gamers, travel agents, and sports broadcasting alike. The possibilities seem endless, but a company has yet to bring a competitive product to market. According to Sony, within the next couple of years gaming will revolutionize virtual reality. Because gaming is such a hot market, tech companies seem to be competing to bring the next generation of gaming technology to market. Although there are many avenues with which this technology could be applied, gaming seems to be the one of most focus. I agree with Sony in that virtual reality will likely be part of the next revolution in gaming, but I am more interested to see how the technology is spread across other markets once it’s introduced. If Sony, or Facebook, or Google, can pull off a VR headset (initially programmed for gaming) I don’t expect it will be long until the talks about applications to education, travel and sports viewing will become reality.

David Mccandless, much on theme with what we have been discussing over the past few lectures, suggests that the best way to navigate our information overloaded world may just be to change the way we see the world. This change might come in the form of visualizations—“beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections”.

Visualizations allow audiences to digest and actually make meaning out of massive amounts of data. They allow you to make comparisons, understand numbers, tell a story, and just look really cool. Data visualizations allow new patterns to be revealed. The audience is prompted to ask different kinds of questions, and allows everyone to digest large amounts of information. Mccandless says: “If you ask the right kind of question or work it [the data] in the right way, interesting things can emerge”, and I couldn’t agree more. Visualizations are extraordinarily powerful and very well could be the future of the way our information is presented and absorbed. In this week’s readings, I was especially interested in The Knotted Line and Freedom’s Ring. Both of these artistic and interpretive timelines inspired me to create a similar visualization, on a smaller scale, for a case study on Coca Cola’s role as a sponsor of the Olympic Games. After a little research, I found a timeline creation tool that allows you to input timeline data and connect those data points to multimedia. The tool pulls all of the data from a google doc spreadsheet, and creates an interactive timeline!

In our world, we are bombarded with information: we have access to it, can collect our own and are constantly being presented with new facts and figures. This information a lot of the time, is difficult to digest and is often reported out of context. Mccandless stressed, “Absolute figures, in an interconnected world don’t actually give you the full picture”. Data visualizations, if more widely implemented, can be the solution to misinterpretation or misunderstanding of data. Data can shape and change perspectives. And if presented in the right way, becomes fun to engage with. What is important is that designers of visualizations collect and utilize only the data necessary for a story to be told or for an argument to be made.

Visualizations might be the solution to our overwhelming exposure to information. But they must incorporate the right data, and present it in context. It must be well thought-out and designed. They must have a user-friendly interface otherwise the data will remain obsolete. Generally, visualizations should probably also follow the Eight Golden Rules–guidelines that help to design and execute a great user interface.

Mccandles closed his TED Talk by saying, “Design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions. And information design is about solving information problems.” It’s exciting to be learning about these tools that are on the cutting edge of information design, and to be a part of a new information age.

I recently read a New York times article that argues technology might be changing the attention spans of students and how they learn. This seems to have been an opinion since the introduction and continued mass use of technology. Because of our constant connectivity to digital entertainment and forms of communication, technology has made “reality, by comparison, uninteresting”.

The digital world is more interesting than the real world in many aspects: it has theme music, is presented in heavily edited flashes, is dramatic and stimulating, and like reality can sometimes even be interacted with. The Times article cites the research of Dr. Dimitri Christakis who studies the impact of technology on the brain: “we are experiencing a supernatural stimulation that teachers might have to keep up with or stimulate”. I thought this approach was interesting. He is suggesting that teachers adjust their strategy to better suit the changing learning habits of their students. As we continue to become more reliant on technology—to communicate, interact and learn—it makes sense to me that we best learn how to use and interact with these newly developing tools.

After having read this article I couldn’t help but laugh, as the first “article” I read for this week was one that didn’t look much like the traditional journal article at all. I was drawn to The Anatomy of a Web Map and proceeded to click through the entire presentation, instead of first picking a 9-page article. It was super interesting to learn about the formation and evolution of digital mapping systems, and gave me a much broader perspective and appreciation for GIS systems. It’s crazy how a concept like “tiles” can completely change the usability of a digital tool! I have no previous background in programming, but was exposed to a GIS-type software in an environmental science class last year. We used the software to predict landscapes over time, by changing different human-made inputs such as pollution or waste disposal. It was an incredibly valuable experience: we were able to actually interact and see what we had been learning in lecture and through our readings actually happening. I think this deeper level of interaction in an invaluable tool, and as Dr. Christakis suggested, I think teachers could evolve their methods of teaching and examination to better utilize digital tools and our new approach to interacting with the world, digitally.

In addition to using these digital tools—especially mapping tools—as educational assets, they can also be used as public tools. City planners can interact with spaces digitally, so as to better plan our urban infrastructure; environmental scientists can track and predict landscape changes; the directionally challenge (like myself) can make their way around town; and public service agents and doctors can more easily track disease.

In this video Steven Johnson, who recently published an Op-Ed piece on the Ebola Crisis in the New York Times, discusses how mapping has historically been a tool for tracking and controlling disease, and how it remains a valuable tool today.

“Data visualization is the presentation of data in pictorial or graphical format. For centuries, people have depended on visual representations such as charts and maps to understand information more easily and quickly.” Data Visualization: What it is and why it is important.

Digitized archives and data visualizations are incredibly powerful tools. They give users the ability to make sense of large amounts of information—allowing them to form questions, make predictions, learn lessons and even plan future actions. As these new mediums of displaying information become more prominent, it is important to understand their limitations and drawbacks, as well as to understand how they are transferred from raw data to their meaningful digitized form. In my blog post last week I discussed in relatively more detail an approach that might be taken when learning from and interpreting data visualizations. Just as we are taught in our statistics classes, for example, to approach graphs and charts skeptically—to ensure they are not misleading or mistaken—we as scholars should also approach data visualizations with a bit of skepticism. In order to best utilize tools such as digital archives or data visualizations, we must first understand the process by which this information is transposed. A great overview of how data can be sorted and “networked” was given in the blog post Demystifying Networks. The author first recognizes that “humanities scholars are often dealing with the interactions of many types of things, and so the algorithms developed for traditional network studies are insufficient for the networks we often have.” He then goes to note “humanists also struggle with fitting square pegs in round holes. Humanistic data are almost by definition uncertain, open to interpretation, flexible, and not easily definable.” Not only is humanities data not easily transferrable in to a digital form, but many initial decisions must be made before the information is transformed—so that the digital form presents the information in a way that supports the author’s arguments or intentions. When interacting with live maps, timelines or online archives for example, we rarely consider the work and decisions that had to be made to publish those works. Lauren Klein, in The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings, makes the point that “as scholars, we do not see the labor involved in transcribing manuscripts into machine-readable text, nor do we think of the discussions—equal parts technical and theoretical—that contribute to the development of the encoding standards and database design that allow us to perform our search queries”. We live and learn in an age of digitized information, and since digital form is relatively new, people don’t quite understand the inputs that make it possible. Because of these tools we can interact with data in a completely new way, we just need to educate ourselves on the inputs that are required for the tools as final products. We must understand these inputs, just as we must understand chart and graph standards in statistics, especially so we can look for and correct mistakes—with new, powerful tools like google refine.

The inputs we must understand include data networking and mapping, employing controlled vocabularies when entering information in to a database, and potential errors and bias that may be present in visualizations.

Although the video below is relatively dry it emphasizes the importance of controlled vocabularies, and again highlights the incredible amount of back work that must be completed for this tools to be usable.

We are currently focusing a lot on information visualizations: extremely useful, modern tools that are intended to present a large amount of data to the reader quickly and in a meaningful way. Data mining is a process that examines large databases in order to find and later present new information. It seeks to close the gap between the hard sciences and humanities—an impressive task, taken on by the authors of Data Mining with Criminal Intent. As visualizations become a more common way of presenting information—tools that are both slick and efficient—we must consider some of their drawbacks. Data visualizations can be presented in countless forms: ranging from interactive maps, to correlation based lined graphs, to artistic “pie charts”. Because of the nature of these visualizations—glossy tools that are meant to present a large amount of data, in order to show a point or persuade—they can easily be presented with mistakes or in a misleading way. Like the examples we saw in class, visualizations can be altered by truncating an axis, omitting data, assigning causation with correlation, and simply not following convention. Not only do we take these visualizations for granted, but we also are less likely to catch mistakes or misinformation because of how they are presented to us—in a quick news clip, or while we are scrolling through a website. Modern society processes information processes information in soundbites and milliseconds, so for the designers of visualizations it is relatively easy to impact opinions and subsequent behavior.

In class we noticed how visualizations make a presenter seem more credible—with the extra props, we are just naturally inclined to believe them! As University of Miami Communications Professor Alberto Cairo notes in his article Lying with Infographics and Visualization, this is interestingly in contrast to the way we process static sources of information: “our eyes are trained to process the visual environment as evidence, and to process the products of language as arguments”. The professor argues, “as long as we do this, there will be those who will continue to tell these visual-lies, convincing us, and often themselves, that evidence will make itself evident and that subjective culture and political biases won’t creep in”. When presenting information through visualizations, there will always be human bias and potential for error—meaning we need to approach them with new, and unnatural scrutiny. Established statistician and author Howard Wainer noted in one of his works: “when we see a chart or diagram, we generally interpret its appearance as a sincere desire to inform. In the face of this sincerity, the misuse of graphical material is a perversion of communication, equivalent to putting up a detour sign that leads to an abyss”.

Although these visualizations are relatively newer ways of presenting information, it is important we recognize how they can be manipulated and consequently approach them with scrutiny. Because even though visualizations are relatively new and are quickly presented and absorbed, they can form lasting opinions and bias. For example, check out this satirical video that presents the Mercator map bias.

Although it’s not a database of historical or research information, throughout this week’s readings I couldn’t help thinking about the website of the company I work for currently. I work for Pinnacle Exhibits, a brand management company that specializes in 3D exhibits and installations. We create temporary environments to change minds, motivate behavior and leave a lasting impression. We are a diverse band of branders, builders, designers, makers, communicators, advertisers and engineers united by a hunger to wow people in 3D. Through my position and time with the company I have learned the great importance of each of these roles—it takes all the talents I listed above to complete each project we take on. I really valued the comment in Meirelles, Design for Information: “It is my hope that this book help broaden the dialogue and reduce the gap between two communities—designers and scientists—and foster problem-solving skills in designing information.” I, and my colleagues at Pinnacle, consider bridging this gap our mission. We employ our diverse talents and specializations to create 3D experiences, and strive to connect consumers with brands.

As Pinnacle continues to grow and evolve as a brand management company, so does our own brand. Our rebranding process has been heavily involved in many aspects of the company, but we especially want to produce an impressionable website. The site is a work in progress, but has already greatly evolved since I joined the company. In the past, the site only incorporated “beauty” shots of our work. At first glance the site was very appealing, but it was not interactive or welcoming. We work to connect brands with consumers, and yet online exhibits of our work did not showcase those consumers interacting in the space! So, our solution to this problem was to incorporate more welcoming, human elements in our online exhibits. The section in Data + Design considered the differences between print and web-based media, as well as static versus interactive exhibits. As a company, we are moving towards all digital and interactive presentations for our clients, so it was interesting to read more on this comparison. Moving forward, it our goal to progress with the digital world. Photos are quickly being replaced by gifs, and short videos. Now homepages and backgrounds of websites use video clips instead of still images—and we want to follow that trend. You can check out our first attempt at chronicling our work through video here. Eventually our goal is to create a portfolio of still images and rich videos on our website that fully represent the Pinnacle brand and work.

I relate this experience to the final project we are creating for this class. Instead of creating exhibits of our work, like we do for Pinnacle, we will be creating exhibits of research information—but the principal is the same. We will have to make important decisions about the message we want to convey, and the elements we need to incorporate in our site in order to convey that message successfully.

There is a consistent theme in many articles relating to digital humanities: metadata is important, and good categorization of information is essential for a digital database, website or exhibit to be functional. An ontology is a “formal framework for representing knowledge…and that framework names and defines the types, properties and interrelationships of the entities in a domain of discourse.” (Wikipedia).

In Local-Global, J. Wallack and R. Srinivasan highlight the importance of intersecting thought-out ontologies with information systems. Ontologies that are mismatched “impede communities’ ability to impart and communicate information and states’ ability to fully understand the territories they govern.” (link to the article)

Although ontologies are meant to represent some sort of reality, they can also be used to shape new realities. If properly designed and executed, these information systems can serve as incredible tools. They can, and should be used for better city planning (as discussed in J. Wallack and R. Srinivasan’s article), better health care systems, etc. The opportunities are endless, but it takes intersecting human thought and decision making with the power of digital tools. The authors of Local-Global write about improvements that need to be made to information systems, but some success stories already exist. Pandora created the still unsurpassed music library, in my opinion, by building the music genome project and Netflix created an online movie library. Both systems learn your preferences and tailor a unique experience. They have an extensive vocabulary and grammar system to categorize and describe their content, and follow impressive algorithms written to learn about the user. For both of these systems to be successful though, it took a perfect marriage of human intuition and decision making with the searching/learning/sorting functions of digital tools. I haven’t really heard anyone describe this better than A. Madrigal, in How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood: “to me, that’s the key step: It’s where the human intelligence of the taggers gets combined with the machine intelligence of the algorithms.”

I extrapolate this “perfect marriage” to apply to the interaction of humans and technology in general, not just in information systems. Right now, wearable technology is growing in popularity and market size. There are tons of wearables already on the market, and new ones continue to emerge: Forbes covered Microsoft’s announcement of a wearable expected to be released this holiday season, which got a lot of attention. The “coming-soon” wearable that caught my attention, though, was will.i.am’s new PULS. Wearables are remarkable new pieces of technology—not only do they incorporate many of the same functions as your smart phone, but they also serve as metadata collectors. (PULS reportedly can even read your emotions!)

Mostly I have been most interested in the fitness and health trackers included in these devices. Wearables collect all kinds of information about you—your sleep habits, your daily activity and levels of exertion, among many others—then presents that information back to you in a way that can shape your decisions and future behavior. These devices connect humans to technology in a newly involved way. And, although I have been impressed and interested in all of the functions of these types of wearables, I have resisted entering the market. For some reason the watches (or ‘cuffs’ as will.i.am calls his new PULS devices) did not seem “human” enough. To me, they were all ugly and clunky, and certainly did not serve as a fashion statement. This is why will.i.am’s new PULS campaign caught my attention.

Human elements need to be incorporated in our development of new technology and information systems—and Pandora and Netflix serve as great testimonials. Will.i.am and his new brand FASHIONOLOGY believe something similar: that it is “inevitable that fashion and technology will come together”. People like me have been hesitant to enter the wearable market because it lacked a certain human element, fashionable design. In a recent press conference, former Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley stated: “it doesn’t matter if a gadget can organize my life and make my dinner, if it’s ugly to look at”, and I couldn’t agree more. He insists that closer collaboration between fashion and technology is urgently required—a collaboration between humans and technology that I think should be extended to all aspects of the digital humanities.

Check out will.i.am’s promotional video for his wearable cuff. His new brand i.am/FASHIONOLGY seeks to take the wearable market mainstream, and once you see the video it’s hard to resist the movement.

Although the underlying purpose of metadata has been in use for far longer, the term and it’s digital application has only been practiced since the early 2000’s. In the past, rich documents, important historical artifacts, art and the like were all tracked manually. If scholars (and the cultures those scholars study) took care in documenting and preserving their history, metadata would be in the form of an archiving system—a system to categorize by context, content and structure. Modern day libraries, for example, use the Dewey decimal system (or one of the like) in order to track and sort their resources. Sometimes, information is not so well documented and tracked. In the case of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence, it took traveling to seven countries and digging through countless “lost” documents in order to track the original. Julia Gaffield, a Duke scholar who headed this mission, was able to uncover the declaration because of attention to metadata centering lost documents—each newly discovered piece served as a clue. Check out the full article of her mission here. Once the original declaration was found, it was presented to the public in a digital form—a form cheaply and widely accessible to all.

It is relatively obvious that in our newly digital world, the prominence and importance of metadata has increased drastically. Metadata gives you all the basic information you need to know about a source: it’s author, date of publication, and even changes that have been made since the creation of the original. Metadata is like the key to an online “work”. As information—about just about anything—becomes more widely accessible, our system of collecting and recording metadata becomes all the more critical. It is critical not just for recording and tracking historical documents (like that of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence), but also for modern life, business and transactions. In fact, collections of metadata are becoming increasingly critical in company’s marketing efforts.

Do you remember the Forbes article  that was published in 2012 about Target, and how they had sent target-ed maternity ads to a teenager…before her family even knew she was pregnant? Well that is a modern example of how metadata has been, and will be used. Target, and many other companies, collect massive amounts of data about their customers. When you shop at Target, you are assigned a customer ID from the moment you walk in the store. That ID is tied to your credit card, name and email address and that becomes “a bucket that stores a history of everything you’ve ever bought and any demographic information Target has collected from you or bought from other sources” (Hill).  Although Target and other companies have adjusted their marketing tactics to make their ads a little less obviously targeted, it is virtually impossible to avoid them as a consumer in the digital world.

Target’s targeted ads were some of the first to really break headlines. Now the practice is all over the news, and being able to collect information on consumers is worth millions. Facebook, Snapchat and the like are highly valued companies—because they collect extremely useful information on you, the consumer. They can then turn around and sell that information to companies, who can send you personalized mailers, emails and sidebar notifications of just the things you want (maybe even before you know you want them). Because of all of the metadata that can be collected on consumers and redistributed to corporations, marketing tactics have and will continue to change drastically. And remember, the collection of this kind of data has only really been around for the past 14 years—imagine how marketing will adapt and change in the next decade.

Works Cited:

Hill, Kashmir. “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.” Forbes. 16 Feb. 2012. Web. 13 Oct. 2014. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/>.

Gaffield, Julia. “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence: Digging for Lost Documents in the Archives of the Atlantic World.”The Appendix 2, no. 1 (January 2014).