The conversations and readings of the past week, while revealing the ways in which the digitization of textual data and text analysis can be extremely helpful to historical research, nonetheless show the many limitations of text analysis and, as Lara Putnam noted in Leon Sharon’s “The Peril and Promise of Historians as Data Creators: Perspective, […]
With the rise of text-based search queues and online databases, I wonder how might text-searches their algorithms create unpredictable new modes of research. In a physical archive, a researcher can utilize a finding aid and seek help from an archivist in order to create a clear gameplan and subsequently go through a collection with precision […]
The theme of discussion and the readings for last week have brought about two questions for me. First, John Markoff’s cahiers case study illustrates a method for how they were able to overcome gaps in archival records, but how might this apply to ephemeral art objects that are no longer extent? Secondly, how might art […]
I appreciated thinking about data from a different point of view—that of an historian. Specifically, I appreciated the way the readings pushed us to think about how things that might not normally be seen as “data” (like the way an historian combs through an archive, takes notes, organizes quotes, makes analytical leaps, and writes it […]
I am thinking through Jo Guldi’s article about “critical search” and bringing in my memories from her talk here at Pitt in January titled “A Distant Reading of Property: Topic Models, Divergence, Collocation, and Other Text-Mining Strategies to Understand a Modern Intellectual Revolution in the Archives,” which dove further into her research about British Parliamentary […]
For this blog post, I’d like to follow Alison’s suggestion to think about how the creation and structuring of data relates to our final projects for this course, drawing on themes from our readings, our class discussion, and my work with Tropy for my final project. An advantage, as I see it, of Tropy is […]
Content moderation, while posing a possible threat to the freedom of information and expression, nonetheless plays an important role in regulating what is posted on internet platforms. While the internet was initially perceived as a potentially free community for the sharing of information and ideas, some measure of moderation must exist to ensure that such […]
The past week of discussions has been incredibly timely; in our current events, it is incredibly important to understand and analyze the ways in which content moderation can be manipulated to craft a specific narrative. As humans work behind the scenes to code and use algorithms that generate public content, I wonder how might this […]
A couple of years ago, a friend shared with me this article by former Google design ethicist, Tristan Harris. Although it is somewhat alarmist with regard to social media, as is his website advocating for more “human” tech design, the readings and discussion last week on platforms and content moderation that called into question the […]
In the paper Platforms are Not Intermediaries (2018), Gillespie carefully outlines the challenges in regulating online platforms that are both conduits of communication and content curators. He suggested a number of actions for balancing the power and freedom that social media platforms and internet service providers (ISPs) have with public obligations. These include an increase […]