Places as City, What About Villages?

asahai

While engaging with the World Historical Gazetteer project and the Recogito project, I tried to experiment with different places and various versions of the places. Few of the words that I tried was Delhi, the capital city of India, Allahabad, a city in the Northern Part of India and Jim Corbett National Park. Much to my surprise, I tried to enter the various version of the spelling of Delhi like New Delhi, Indraprastha, Dili or Dilli, and the first result in the list provided was always Delhi and then subsequently other places that have the same or similar names.
Similarly, I tried to search for places like Allahabad which is also known as Praygraj and has a spelling variant Illahabad. In my search, Allahabad often referred to as a city and was displayed by its other name as well. However, the spelling variant did not get accounted for. In addition, Allahabad is also the name of the district in which the city Allahabad is located. This was of particular interest to me because the WHG referred to Allahabad as a city and not as a district. Lastly, the tried to search for Corbett National Park, a national park and a small village located northeast of Delhi. To which there were no results.
I tried to assimilate these findings in the data set I decided to upload on WHG however I encountered an error.
My experience with Recogito was slightly different. To understand the interface of the project was easy along with its many features. I reviewed a few of the case studies that were uploaded on the blog of Recogito to understand how the project is utilized by scholars of various fields. However, while I tried to upload the article Critical Regionalism by Kenneth Frampton but there was an error in uploading the file. I tried multiple file types (doc, docx and pdf) to find the same results.
My overall questions/observations that came through after engaging with both the projects are:
(a) Importance of city as a place given over national parks and villages and other kind of spatial categorization
(b) In though I could not upload my text on the Recognito but the feature of able to edit and add places on the map to annotate them is an enriching innovation, however, do we have a way to verify the content?

Citations and Its Limitations

asahai

Reflection of Citation Exercise.
I did the citation exercise for two authors, Kenneth Frampton and Keith Eggener. While the former is a well-known name in the academic conversation of modern architectural history, the latter is equally renowned yet many of his work are published only in architectural magazines. Following are my reports on both authors:
Author: Keith Eggener
Work: Garden of El Pedregal (a book)
Total number of citations: 4
Two of which are self-cited while the remaining two are book reviews.
Total number of publications by the author were 9.
h-index: 3
average citation per item: 3.11
sum of times cited (without self-citations): 25
Author: Kenneth Frampton
Work: Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance.
Total number of citations: 2
One in an architectural education journal while other in a romantic studies journal, Hispanofila
Total number of publications by the author were 38.
h-index: 10
average citation per item: 9.05
sum of times cited (without self-citations): 323
In studying these two data sets, I realized the shortcomings of the data collection platform that is selective and gather data only from journals. It looks across only academic fields and how these works are used within the academic circle. This is of particularly interest because if these numbers are used in evolutions for hiring and tenure and it only makes judgment basis on the influence of academic on academia. It does not account for influence which research may have on other professional fields. For example, an article of pedagogy may not get cited enough but it possibly could be applied to practice of pedagogy. These influences do not get accounted for. Additionally, I am concerned about the highly limited influence circle this data set studies. Limited in sense of region. The data set acknowledges academic circles of USA and Europe. These data set may not be available from other countries like India, Nigeria or Peru. The absence of these data set from other countries would make academic opportunities difficult for people outside of it to attain a tenure.

Reflection on Redings:
In the article The Mismeasure of Science: Citation Analysis, we see how citations may not always account for the reference and influences upon a work. In my own research I am guilty of this mismeasure. How do I account for information which:
1) I have gathered over the years as a native of the region. Those sources of information and influences often have lack of empirical support due to which they may not get cited.
2) Methods like survey and interviews, which are often not the prime data collection methodology in field of History of Art and Architecture, are not accounted in the citations.
These are few among many citation difficulties I as a scholar find myself juggling with. Within this frame where citations are an ‘on-going process’, how do we account for the success of a scholar and estimate the evaluation for hiring? In my estimation, only looking at the citations would not be helpful.

Paradoxical Presence of Hierarchy and Subversion

asahai

In the seminar so far, I have dealt with scholarships which are unfamiliar and written with a different perspective. It is helping me develop an understanding of the nature of data I use in my own research and how certain biases and prejudices are inbuilt in the date which I am oblivious about. I often take for granted the categorization I use in the research and the readings and discussions we have done in the seminar thus far have been reflecting on these biases. I realized how these categorizations can itself assert their hegemonic voices in the research which I constantly try to subvert in my own research I conduct. The paradoxical nature of the data and the interest is something I realized through my conversations. In the coming edition of the seminars, I hope to find tools through which we can target these biases in scholarships of humanities.

Unit 2a

Women in Labour Roles

asahai

In my search for data on women in labour roles, the data was diverse and often targeted on more than one aspect of labour roles. Following are the major sources:
1. The World’s Women 2015: Trends and Statistics by the United Nations Statistics Division which is an annual publication. It presented data on aspects like women and men in the labour force, employment conditions of women and men, reconciliation of work and family life. The report also compared data of developing and developed countries.
2. Women in labour markets: Measuring progress and identifying challenges presented by the International Labor Office (2010). This reported on aspects like labour utilization and underutilization and the various environments in which women are working. The labour market was studied to understand the access of the labour market opportunities for women in comparison to males, giving a glimpse into the historical trends and the multiple drivers, and analyzing the life-span patterns of female participation.
3. Labour force participation rate (percentage of female population ages 15+) by the International Labor Organization (2019). This data presented is the slightly more “raw” fashion were unlike the previous one which is more analyzed and presented in a form of a report, where the data is given for our interpretation. I personally found it hard to understand how to approach the simple data on the graph chart since there was a lack of parameters and area division or any other supporting information.
Besides these reports and data that are presented in refined/unrefined manner, I also discovered the application of these reports in initiatives like Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) which consume and produce the data for the purpose of “integration of gender issues into the regular production of official statistics for better, evidence-based policies”.
Considering the data, I found on the subject in the light of the past discussion, I am concerned with the intention of the produced data and the political nature attached to these data. The omnipresent comparison of one country to another in almost all the reports is particularly telling and I hope to discuss this idea in class further.

Unit 2B

Introduction to Arushi Sahai

asahai

Bonjour, my name is Arushi Sahai. I am a second-year PhD student in History of Art and Architecture Department. My area of interest is Indian Modern Architecture though in future years I hope to expand and learn about Modern Architecture of developing countries similar to India.
My goal for the class is to be interdisciplinary in my research without alienating my discipline or offending another discipline. Above all, I am intrigued by the ‘digital’ component of the seminar. As part of my undergraduate education in Media Studies, I have had limited interactions with the digital world, which needless to say also comprises my limited definition of the word ‘digital’. With the seminar, I hope to explore what truly comprises of ‘digital’ and how my research can blend with technological developments.