This article is one that is very interesting and brings up many interesting issues concerning the work done my digital humanitarians. Their efforts to help facilitate the work of professional writers are crucial to their succus and yet their work is constantly overlooked and even at times deemed non-scholarly. I found this article very though provoking because of how challenging this question is. Why aren’t certain tools deemed scholarly if they are used to create a scholarly piece? If writer uses a program that helps create their bibliography or uses a topic model to create important connections from a vague text, how can it not be counted as a scholarly tool?

This article was very short but provided a lot of information about an issue that arises when trying to extract spatial information. The ambiguity that comes when trying to locate places with similar names is an example of how things can go wrong. In order to help fix this issue, computer scientists utilize the context of documents to associate places by references points to narrow down this such as country, state and city. Through these reference points and programs such as NER and NLP, users can identify places talked about in interviews and then map locations for visualization. This visualization created helped show the moving process of people in Virginia around this time. I think this article was a great way to explore the fault in some programming and show how searching for specific things does not always get you the results you need. Sometimes we need to look outside what we are actually looking for.

This article was one that I found very thought provoking. Our author was able to take an in-depth look into lynchings and create visualizations from data to different frequencies at which it occurred. It was very upsetting to learn that there was no official information collected on lynchings until people like Ida B. Wells and those of the Tuskegee institute worked on anti-lynching movements. This made me realize that though the visualization and information is useful, it is not complete. We cannot fully know how many lynches actually happened per week or how many lynching victims there actually were per county because there was never and initial data collection origin. I love how the author was able to connect this to today and the extrajudicial killings done by police. He is able to connect that there is no official collection of those deaths but if studied we would not see any new trends because there is not “a radical rise in the rate at which black men and women are killed by police, but only an increased prominence of their position in the public discourse.” Black bodies being punished for their race is not new, it is a trend that has always been carried out by the law.

This article was one that I found very interesting. The in-depth look into the James Hemings and his life was a very revealing experience. It is easy to gather information from documents but I have never seen how people attempt to gain information for the lack of documents. There were no official documents about James Hemings but through using many different tools historians were able to gain some insight on his life from Thomas Jefferson’s documented letter. This article was a great teaching moment, showing me that the lack of information on a person or certain thing does not mean that story must remain unknown. Using certain tools and human intuition we can “offers some acknowledgement of the lives and stories that will forever remain unknown”.

This article discusses the idea of text analysis and visualization and how we use both skills to gain what we need from text. There are ways that we as humans do these things involuntary however we often rely on programs to scan, track and search for us. We are encouraged to rely on these tools but to not forget our human intuition; the only way things produce meaning is when we chose to give something meaning. An example of this was the difference between a text box and a 3D visual that shows the interaction of those words over time. Both provide information but one does it tailored to our needs and motives for application. I think the major takeaway from the article was that with using digital assistance there should always be a balance. One should not rely heavily on tools for analysis and visualization and if one decides to use tools they should use more than one to get the most out of it.

I would like to thank classmate “msomkuti” for their comments, without them I would not have fully understood the article.

This article was one that I did not completely understand but the more I read the more I think I got a better grasp of the topic. Our writers speak about the idea of the Simpson’s Paradox and how it is this phenomenon that implicitly connects or reverses the certain trends of individual pieces of data when they are in comparison with one another. The article addresses that it is something we should try to avoid but I am not sure as to why. Is this a connection that humans are forcing or something that happens on its own? I do not understand how we presenting information by comparing all the subgroups reveals our implicit bias. Is it bias because we choose to specifically order the data this way?

The Changing State of Recidivism: Fewer People Going Back to Prison Response

These articles discuss the decline in recidivism in certain states around the United States and how there are fewer people going back to prison. Our authors discuss how data shows that the number of prisoners being reincarcerated after being released for 3 years has dropped about 25% since the previous report completed in 2005. The process of how all prisoners are logged and how through them acting as data points in the grand scheme of the prison system make it easier to collect data on their crime, their sentence and whether they entered back once they were released. Though interesting, there were two aspects of this article that I did not quite understand. First, I did not understand how the lack of specifics on each prisoner’s case “has complicated efforts to understand the aggregate effects of myriad federal, state, and local efforts to reduce reoffending” (Gelb).  Secondly, luckily to classmate ‘mgates’ I saw that states had the option to not provide information. This makes me question how valid this data collected is. Unless things are getting worse why would states withhold their data?

This reading so far has been the most interesting. It appears to tell a story of the encounter between a young man, Gaal and future telling mathematician, Seldon. Their interaction is confidential due to the fact that Gaal has been followed by agents prior to this meeting. I am fascinated by this article because of the science fiction and mystical atmosphere that it creates. My heart lives and flourishes in the realm of imagination. It seems that Seldom is trying to explain to Gaal that he knows of the impending doom of something that now seems sacred and magnificent. It takes a while for Gaal to fully comprehend but once he does, he is stunned. This information appears to be top secret and as a result is something that could get Seldon killed, but he does not fear and chooses to continue in his endeavors. I do not completely understand the connection to our topic of data with this reading but I think Seldon’s onlooking eye could be how we view technology and the use of data. Now it is something that is marvelous and contemporary but with time will come to its impending doom.

https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.dropbox.com/s/j6oj2rw64bwhaab/Asimov%20%5BPsychohistory%5D.pdf?dl=0

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