DR – Data Cultures

Posted on December 5, 2018 by DR

Hans Rosling “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 minutes.” Response

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My favorite piece of data visualization that we were given this semester was the video made by Hans Rosling “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 minutes.” This is an awesome video that really showed what data visualization can be. It has so much information but was able to display it in an easy to understand and see visualization. It is also fascinating that information that was involved in the video. When he explained what was going on in a country that accounts for their big burst of income or life expectancy. I couldn’t agree more with my colleague JH as they express many of the same idea that I do. They go more into depth about the specifics of the video but overall say it was intriguing and effective.

Posted on December 5, 2018 by DR

Counter Mapping Response

Although it is not a reading, I found the video about counter mapping very interesting and engaging. I had seen this video before in a class that I took in high school, but I saw it in a totally different light after taking this course. This video displays how visualization can mean more than one might first think. To outsiders these pieces of art just look like pictures of the landscape thrown together but to the Zuni it was maps of the places that they had been millions of times. But the question is presented if this can really be classified as a map. This idea is explained greatly by my colleague RC which compares the value to evoke feelings and histories for the Zuni people rather than being an accurate representation of the area. This is still an interesting visualization, but we have to question in accuracy for everyone.

Posted on December 5, 2018 by DR

Psychohistory

This reading about psychohistory I found very interesting! I don’t usually think about mathematics being related to the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli. This source does mention the it assumed that the human “conglomerate being dealt with is sufficiently large for valid statistical treatment.” The size reaction is determined Seldon’s First Theorem along with the development of properties congruent to those of such social and economic forces. It is amazing the dialog that they are able to create using this technology. My colleague with J-OS hits the nail on the head when they say that this article highlights the fact that data is more than just numbers in their reading response to this article. They were also interested into how data can be used to investigate human interaction.

Posted on November 22, 2018 by DR

FAIR article response

This article about the guiding principles for findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable data was very interesting and I enjoyed it quite a lot. Towards the beginning of the article I really like the idea that was presented and upheld. This idea was that this document is a “guide to FAIRness of data, not a specification”. I think it is very important to specify these as guidelines as all sets of data are different and some might not be able to meet the criteria. Again they say later “the purpose of this document is not to define nor suggest and technological implementation for any of these facets, but rather to define the characteristics, norms, and practices that data resources, tools, and infrastructures should exhibit in order to be considered ‘Fair’, and FAIR-ness can be achieved with a wide range of technologies and implementations.” This document also does a good job defining concepts, data object, and meta data to make this information really accessible to everyone. Also, the figures make kind of explain the overall idea of what’s going on with FAIR within each aspect of data. This was an interesting article that presented information in fair way haha.

Posted on November 22, 2018 by DR

Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities

Honestly, I did not like this reading very much at all. I feel like the information given throughout this text isn’t very useful and a lot if filler. A lot of the information that is given within the first half of the article is hard for me to find correlations to the main idea. It starts out with all this talk about people posting in online journals which would be stressful but then it goes into scholarship and whether those doing such things are still engaged in humanistic inquiry. A part that I did enjoy from the reading is the part about theories and how they should be more accessible to those that that don’t have a higher education. I particularly like this description “A well-tuned instrument might be used to understand something, but that doesn’t mean that you, as the user, understand how the tool works. Computers, with chains of abstraction extending upward from the bare electrical principles of primitive XOR gates, are always in some sense opaque” I don’t know if it was just me, but I feel that this reading was hard to understand and for the most part went right over my head.