Course blog

“Digital Harlem” documents the hustle and bustle of the neighborhood of Harlem between the years of 1915 and 1930, as a part of a collaborative project by historians at the University of Sydney. The main focus of the project is to capture the lives of “ordinary” African Americans living in Harlem, rather than the majority of studies on Harlem at this time that focus on the “unordinary,” black artists and the middle class. Ordinary life is captured through an interactive map on the website. The site allows users to search by events, people, and places through a vast record of information collected through legal records, newspapers, and archives. I noticed at first, when searching the database, how the majority of the events documented are crimes, which prompted me to figure out why this was the case. By searching through the website even further, I found out that Harlem at this time had such high crime rates because many citizens in the neighborhood struggled with poverty and desperation. This reminded me of a Langston Hughes poem I have read before titled “Harlem” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175884) which addresses the limitation of the American Dream concerning African Americans. Like “Digital Harlem,” which avoids the common, positive study on the art and success that came out of Harlem at the time, this poem disregards the success of many African Americans and focuses on the issues during this time. This unusual perspective gives the reader/user much more to think about since it is not generally focused on in society. By looking at the problems at this time, it helps us understand and acknowledges the achievements at this time.

Harlem
by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Surveillance is omnipresent.  Unbeknownst to us, we are simultaneously observing, analyzing, and implementing hundreds, thousands of aggregated data/information.  Essentially, we are acting as surveillance cameras, through our eyes and ears; we decipher information pertinent to ours likes, needs, and wants on a daily basis.  We have heard the controversy surrounding our government agencies with this regard.  There is no need to regurgitate. However, it is important to note that surveillance is both good and bad.  Aggregation of information, metadata, is beneficial to scholars and other professionals for analysis and what to do with this a wealth of information.

Last week, UCLA received an $11 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health  to create a specialized group (center) that “would study biomedical data analysis,” says Amanda Schallert, Daily Bruin senior staff member.  The grant serves as a crucial aid for standardizing complex biomedical data.  It will employ researchers who garner data from other researchers in order to provide comprehensive and easy to understand information needed in this focused field.  To be frank, it all sounds incredibly complex to me just from reading ‘biomedical data’ (Schallert).  Nonetheless, UCLA is incredibly appreciative of this generous gift and aims to execute its agenda in the forthcoming years.

I would like to back track a bit to an article I read about data, Metadata.  At first, the title sounded intriguing, Understanding Metadata.  Sure, I’d like to understand metadata.  The conventional definition suits it right: data about data.  The article defined metadata clearly, and differently, along with other terms I had not been acquainted with: Interoperability, Dublin Core, The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and the list goes on.  These are all sub-terms under the umbrella of what constitutes metadata as a field of study.  I quickly saw my eyes glaring over and losing focus when terms upon terms rolled up on my screen.  What I noticed was that I was unable to process and digest this information.  I did not posses the tools necessary to absorb the information due to a lack of brain wiring/coding if you will.  Then, I made the connection.  The grant I mentioned earlier, the group focused on collecting biomedical data, is precisely what I lacked.  It will create the tools and equipment necessary to understand information.

‘Ah ha.’  That was the moment I connected the dots.  Naturally, it all made sense afterwards once I translated that experience to my life.

Daily Bruin:

http://dailybruin.com/2014/10/10/ucla-receives-11m-nih-grant-to-create-center-for-big-data-computing/

Understanding Metadata:

http://www.niso.org/publications/press/UnderstandingMetadata.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

http://dailybruin.com/2014/10/10/ucla-receives-11m-nih-grant-to-create-center-for-big-data-computing/

I finally understand.

Metadata is a term I’ve heard thrown around a lot by some friends and coworkers, but never completely understood until now.

I’m an avid user of social media, especially Twitter and Facebook. Some people can say my obsession is a disappointing quality of my character, but I love it for a very specific reason. Social media is almost like a science that can conclude more about us than what is on our profiles. A scary thought in terms of privatization, but fascinating nonetheless.

Like many other social media outlets, Twitter utilizes many aspects of metadata that can record your location, what language you speak, interests, and learn a great deal about you just by monitoring your behavior on social.

I knew about how much information about me was being recorded, but I never knew what it was called or where it was going. According to Neal Ungerleider’s Fast Company article, Twitter can determine what language you speak based on messaging metadata, meaning the language in which you sent messages was recorded. This information can then use geographic data from your location of sent tweets to determine where you live, essentially.

Another interesting aspect of metadata that I thought of while reading the article, “What is Metadata?” are hashtags. The hashtag is its own form of metadata that groups related things to one another in an incredibly vast, and almost daunting un-navigable digital space. It has actually been used in the metadata world for quite some time to categorize. But in the world of social media, has only really become commonly used when social media outlets like Twitter and Vine emerged. The use of hashtags is where metadata shines. By using hashtags in regards to certain topics, people can connect with those who share in similar interests.

The world of Twitter and even social media in general utilize metadata and the form of metadata in HTML as its asset. It creates a digital space for users from all around the world to connect and make it easier to connect in conversation through hashtags or “suggestions to follow” from the web application itself. By using data to collect more information about you, Twitter is enhancing a user’s experience and, in many ways, positively enhancing the way we use metadata in our every day lives. Especially with the millennial generation’s use of it, it seems to be working.

“These Amazing Twitter Metadata Visualizations Will Blow Your Mind.” Neal Ungerleider. Fast Company. 2013. http://www.fastcompany.com/3013208/these-amazing-twitter-metadata-visualizations-will-blow-your-mind

National Information Standards Organization, “What is Metadata?” (Bethesda, MD: NISO Press, 2004)

https://www.hersheys.com/reeses/products/reeses-peanut-butter-cups/milk-chocolate.aspx

http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm267499.htm

http://myfitnesspal.com

“Setting the Stage” by Anne J. Gilliland is an introduction to the definition and purpose of metadata. Metadata, or “data about data”, “is understood in different ways by the diverse professional communities that design, create, describe, preserve, and use information systems and resources”. Metadata’s function differs from each metadata standard because Gilliland argues that there is no standard adequate for describing all the collections of data. But it is crucial that metadata is stored and structured in an effective way so the process of retrieving the data is effective, now and in the future. Without the proper storage and maintenance of metadata in databases, it is incredibly difficult to decode information objects and make it public knowledge.

In the early 90s the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided to make one of the now most used types of metadata available to the public – nutrition facts. Since 1994 the nutrition fact label has been printed on every sold packaged food product sold in America to help inform customers about the fat, carbohydrates, and sodium content, along with the percentage of daily calories in the given serving size. For example, one of the links above leads us to the nutritional information of a Reeses peanut butter cup. The second link given above is the FDA’s guide on reading a nutrition label. So using the latter to, in a sense, “decode” the nutrition label and turn it into useful data, we find that based on a 2,000 calorie diet, two Reeses peanut butter cups is about 10% of the amount of calories one should be eating per day, 20% of the total fat, 6% of the sodium; the list goes on. Thanks to nutrition fact labels, we know that (unfortunately) eating twenty Reeses peanut butter cups would be doubling the amount of total fat our bodies should be having per day. The nutrition facts act as the metadata, and the labels act as a way to organize this metadata in an effective way so we as consumers now know about exactly what we’re eating.

Another publicly accessibly tool besides the nutrition food label is the database that contains this type of metadata. MyFitnessPal is an open-source database, or record-keeping system, that has most of the world’s nutrition fact labels stored. The web app allows users to add metadata and use the existing metadata to track their daily calories and other nutrition data. MyFitnessPal is an example of giving the public an easy way to access useful metadata to help improve their lives. Nutrition fact labels are an incredibly valuable development, but expanding the storage of metadata in a useful way is the future of informational systems.

For me, Julia Gaffield’s “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence: Digging for Lost Documents in the Archives of the Atlantic World” was a particularly fascinating and powerful read this week. Gaffield’s account documents the discovery, or rather, “re-discovery”, of the Haiti’s Declaration of Independence. Acknowledging the Declaration’s overwhelming significance to the Haitian people, Gaffield understands the document’s discovery as not only historically significant but culturally importantly to advance “the obvious hunger for an alternative narrative of Haiti, one that emphasized the global significance of its achievements during and after the revolution”. Acknowledging the document’s significance to Haitians across time – from 1804 to present day, Gaffield’s conscientious understanding of Haitians becomes more than morally significant.

Overwhelmingly key for Gaffield was her understanding of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence as a cultural product of the Haitian people, not the Haitian country. Gaffield aptly conjectures the Haitian Declaration of Independence, created at the dawn of globalization, and many other documents relating to countries involved in Atlantic Trade, would be found scattered amongst these involved countries. “The movement of people, goods, and ideas created an integrated Atlantic community”, thus delineated a community bound not by border lines and nationalities but networks via tangible and intangible goods. As a result, Gaffield’s account perhaps more importantly signals the significance of acknowledging communities existing beyond geographic classification.

Gaffield’s understanding of community beyond geography immediately reminded me of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Imagined Communities argues for the “imagined community”, individuals identifying with the same national identity regardless of geography. Originally a commentary on nationalism post-globalization, the concept of the “imagined community” evolved to facilitate broader discussions of communal solidarity – here, Haiti’s part in Atlantic Trade and these countries’ part in Haiti’s independence. This concept is literally illustrated in the map of the US linked to at the start of the post. The colors marking populations of ethnic-identification illustrates the spread of ethnic identification as having no correspondence to the state borderlines strewn across the map. While individuals of the same ethnic-identification are connected, they are not connected geographically via the states they live in but their own identification to an ethnic background linking them to a “community” of others throughout the US who share the same background. Yet, despite the increasingly-apparent porousness of these borders certainly doesn’t diminish the significance of communities within borderlines and geography, though, as this post hopefully highlights, those without physical distinction deserve just as much regard.

The National Information Standards Organization had pointed out that, “Metadata is key to ensuring that resources will survive and continue to be accessible into the future” (1). Throughout the article, the three main types of metadata that were discussed seemed to focus on how to properly document a resource’s identity, origin, and other information needed to preserve or archive the resource. However, what I found in Gilliland’s article that felt more relevant to the general public’s association with metadata was that multiple versions of a digital object can be reformed to fit any user’s need or point of view. Thus, the identification of one form of metadata can become a very complicated path of tracing one type of information object to the next. It really fascinates me that such a complex system exists that we can use metadata to categorize any information object at any level of aggregation no matter how different the information object can become in its lifetime.

As a gaming enthusiast, this particular article jumped out to me because it was a form of data visualization that captured the movements of 100,000 players and mapped their patterns across 10,000 games. The video in itself was a collection of metadata comprised in the recordings of 10,000 games hosted by another site. As you scroll to the bottom of the page, the article consists of another set of videos that show the movements of different roles in the game along with gifs on the side that portray examples of those roles. Upon inspecting the elements of the site, I was able to find all of the information objects’ metadata found in the form of URLs of the gifs and other images used in the article. This relatively new way of interacting with metadata raised a few questions that were addressed in Gilliland’s article.

What I imagined when I read this article was a series of nesting dolls in which this article was composed of multiple digital objects that all had different metadata on their own. However, when they were all aggregated into this one article through hyperlinks and embedment, it became another digital archive with its own identifiable metadata. This relates to another point brought up by Gilliland that along with the development of the Internet and its networked digital information systems, many issues arise that must be addressed with new types of metadata. In the brief section about multiversioning, she talks about a need for metadata that can differentiate what is qualitatively different between versions of digitalized objects beyond descriptive metadata. For example, by creating a gif composed of either animated or static images, a different form of metadata would be necessary to tackle the variations of the original information objects. This also leads to further questions regarding legal issues and intellectual property rights that would warrant another form of metadata to shift through the multiple layers of an information system and identify the original creators of its contents.

Works Cited:

National Information Standards Organization, “What is Metadata?” (Bethesda, MD: NISO Press, 2004)

Anne Gilliland, “Setting the Stage,” from Murtha Baca, ed., Introduction to Metadata (Los Angeles: Getty, 2008)

Tom Giratikanon, J. (2014). Watch 10,000 League of Legends Games in 30 Seconds. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/10/technology/league-of-legends-graphic.html?_r=0 [Accessed 13 Oct. 2014].

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-12/what-if-the-redcoat-nsa-had-access-to-paul-reveres-metadata

http://www.ibtimes.com/spying-celebrities-nyc-taxi-metadata-exposes-celeb-locations-strip-club-clients-1696744

I was directed to this very interesting article from another about NYC taxi metadata exposing personal information about celebrities. The article featured in Bloomberg Businessweek technology section also relates to metadata and people’s personal privacy.  Although it may seen more abstract than actually hacking and reading emails, the collection of metadata is almost equally invasive.  Meta data is comprised of five categories that help to describe the types of metadata.  These categories are administrative metadata, descriptive metadata, preservation metadata, technical metadata, and use meta data.  All of this information about a certain set of data can help someone reveal the big picture about the data without actually being given the data.  Large amounts of metadata can be easily processed through computer algorithms and then analyzed.  Because so much data can be put into these large computers, there is essentially no limit to what the data can uncover.

Although this can seem alarming, other people argue that there should not be concern with all of this data being available to the government.  Many people believe that if the government does their job and doesn’t overstep their boundaries, it will truly be in place just to protect us.  Also other people argue that the only people that have to be concerned with being monitored if they are doing something illegal.  I disagree with this, basing my opinion off of all of the hacking I have seen recently in the media.  Although I know that hacking  pictures from celebrities is very different from gathering legally obtained metadata, there is still a certain sense of creepiness associated with anyone being able to learn information you might not want to be public.

The use of metadata in one of the articles about Jessica Alba and Bradley Cooper to show that they did not tip their cab drivers exposes something they  have done that they did not think people would find out about and are probably not proud of.  Although I don’t think I would be someone that would be of particular interest when it comes to collecting data, it does make me think twice about how much information is known about my calls, messages, and other phone habits.  My cellphone is the devise I use most in my day to day life and access to metadata about its usage would tell a lot about what I do and where I go. This information will not seriously affect my actions in my day to day life, but will make me think twice about not doing anything I wouldn’t want to be tracked and linked to me.

The emergence of new technologies has created an inevitable shift in the perspectives and paradigms of researchers, students, and community participants alike. The abundance of preservation software and digital archives has only increased throughout the last decade as archivists and scholars are realizing the importance of maintaining documents crucial to the political and social histories of communities around the world. However, as days, months, and years go by without correctly storing these important academic and cultural findings, we are losing integral parts of our worldy culture that cannot be restored.

Reading through Gaffield’s article on her search for the Haitian Declaration of Independence initially excited me, as I am a history junkie who relishes the idea of having my own National Treasure moment, excavating historical documents and treasures deep inside the Pyramids of Giza or the mysterious lost city of Atlantis. I appreciate how she thought outside the box and conducted thorough and unique research on the involved participants to draw more conclusive findings than any previous researcher had done before her. In similar ways to Gaffiled’s innovative research, Noriega’s work with UCLA’s Chicano Research Studies Center, utilized creative methods to preserve all forms of media related to the field of Chicano Studies. I admire the focus on protecting important historical documents for the use of both academic institutions and cultural communities.

In my last quarter at UCLA, I had the honor researching important projects and documents related to the city of Los Angeles and its past and present infrastructure. Naturally, as a Digital Humanities Minor, I was drawn to the Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform (LAADP), an online archive of articles, documents, and other relevant information contextualizing the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. This platform revealed the various social, political, and environmental impacts the aqueduct has made on the community and the nation. Through the compilation of various text and media samples such as photographs, maps, newspapers clippings, and pamphlets, the public is able to look at past archives to discover the historical significance behind the Los Angeles Aqueduct. This platform enables scholars and students alike to assess how the community has managed water over the past century, and provides ideas on how to continue maintaining it throughout the next century and beyond. The nature of databases proves to be unbiased because they draw from so many different sources, libraries, and other research institutions. The LAADP is fashioned in the same way, putting heavy emphasis on the diverse list of resources it pulls from. It provides permanent samples from over a century’s worth of historical events, cultivating dynamic conversations over the innovative perspectives it reveals.

The emphasis on a depth and breadth of information in archives and databases adds to the credibility and usefulness of the source itself. Gaffield’s extensive research in combination with Noriega’s variety of preservation methods and the accessibility of the LAADP contributes to the value we put on digital archives in our world today.

Works Cited:

Bon, Lauren, and Metabolic Studio. Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform. UCLA Library

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)

Chon Noriega, “Preservation Matters,” Aztlan 30:1 (2005)