This Week: How Will the Changing Roles of Data and Media Affect Teaching and Learning?

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• October 3, 2015

Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Sava Saheli Singh.

It was tough to pick links for this week’s round up because there is always so much going on. The following collection of a wide range of topics all point to one thing: we’re at a point in time where big decisions are being made about what we do with data and media, and these decisions can and will affect how we teach, learn, and live in a world that is well past being untouched by technology.

There have been a couple of interesting open access tools released recently that can have an impact on research efforts:

PRISONER is an interesting approach that takes ethics into consideration for conducting social network research, forcing data that is collected to adhere to particular ethical parameters that PRISONER has set. TACIT is an open source Text Analysis, Crawling, and Interpretation Tool developed by the Computational Social Science Lab at USC. This tool aims to provide a one-stop platform with which to gather, analyze, and manage data from online sources ranging from Reddit to US Supreme Court transcripts. Amanda Visconti provides a great round up of resources on data visualization tools as they relate to the digital humanities. And finally, if you want data visualizations to help you keep up with various occurrences across the ‘net, you might want to consider the Internet Monitor’s new Internet Dashboard.

Speaking of tacit, Aimée Morrison recently wrote about tacit knowledge in graduate education and calls for making implicit knowledge more explicit, including starting a twitter hashtag – #tacitPhD – so people can contribute to the different types of tacit knowledge they were given during the course of their graduate lives.

In news that will certainly affect how we access technology and media online, the Librarian of Congress is stepping down, bringing up the question of who is the right kind of person to take over. As Politico reports, the Library of Congress has been called out for seeming behind the times when it came to technology adoption and it appears that there is a push for a more “tech savvy” person to take the helm. Let’s hope that bringing more technology to the Library of Congress means increased access not only for researchers and academics but also for the general public.

Selfies are an undeniable part of our lives now, for better or for worse. They are an increasingly common topic in classrooms and research, but there is a case that may have some interesting ramifications for selfie ownership. In a twist to a story that started last year when the copyright of a monkey selfie was brought into question, Sarah Jeong provides an interesting look at PETA’s case against the photographer who claimed copyright of the monkey selfie. The outcome of lawsuits like this – while seemingly trivial at first – can have ramifications beyond animal selfies to affect digital media production and representation as a whole.

To round out this round-up, a few more interesting things to keep on your radar:

• In their ongoing series #fight4edu, the Futures Initiative at CUNY continue the conversation through workshops and online discussions.
• If you have worked on research that deals with big data and dealt with ethical conflicts, the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society will pay you to add your case study to their collection pedagogical resources.
• This panel at Columbia looks at whether Open Access to data is always a good thing.

Featured Image: Self-portrait of a female Celebes crested macaque (Macaca nigra) in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, who had picked up photographer David Slater’s camera and photographed herself with it. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This Week: Polar Bears and #ObamaSelfies: The Critical Intersections of Digital Humanities and Environmental Justice

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• September 17, 2015

Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Amanda Starling Gould.

This week’s roundup looks at the intersections of digital humanities (DH) and environmental justice.

Polar bears are trending this week on my Twitter and Facebook feeds. Four in particular:

https://instagram.com/p/4kDKJvxJAM/

These polar bears have come to represent this week’s debates on climate change—especially those critiquing the ethical and political stakes of President Obama’s recent trip to Alaska to speak at the GLACIER Conference in Anchorage.

Debates aside, part of that trip included a heavy dose of Obama selfies.

President Obama even does a ‘selfie video’ with a glacier:

President Obama takes a ‘Selfie’ video with a glacier. Courtesy of CNN.com

Though it is fun and perhaps noteworthy that our president is using social media, what is more exciting is the potential for this form of #Selfie + #ClimateChange (or #ActOnClimate as @WhiteHouse uses above) to be a digital call for environmental action.

This provokes several questions that are currently bubbling at the core of much of my own recent work and teaching: How can we use digital tools and methods to productively address environmental issues? How could we design classroom and research assignments that use digital media and DH methods to productively interrogate complex environmental issues? As we use DH tools to discuss environmental issues, how can we use the very materialities of the digital infrastructure—from its complex mineral composition to our resource-hungry data centers and toxic e-waste accumulations—to critically address both DH and environmental justice?

President Obama’s selfies are certainly one place to start. What if Californians began taking selfies with their drought-parched patches? What if Oregonians began taking selfies with their raging wildfire megablazes? What if we extended this #SelfieWithClimateChange challenge to commuters in Beijing or failing farmers in New Zealand? If we had our students use Instagram and Twitter to solicit such images, and then asked our students to work collaboratively to curate those images into a digital project, would this inspire reflection on climate change issues? I’m guessing so. And I’m guessing this is a small part of what President Obama was performing during his trip.

This week as California conserves water and the west coast fights wildfires caused by severe dryness, California governor Jerry Brown tells the state, in a trending online video, that “[t]his is the future, from now on. It’s going to get worse, just by the nature of how the climate’s changing.”

On Monday, @NYTScience tweeted a new NYTimes.com article on California’s ‘historic’ drought that quotes bioclimatoligist A Park Williams who two weeks ago released a report stating that “[a]nthropogenic warming has intensified the recent drought as part of a chronic trend toward enhanced drought that is becoming increasingly detectable and is projected to continue growing throughout the rest of this century.”

If this digital media environmentalism is making a persuasive impact on popular sentiment or is resulting in a heightened awareness of earth stewardship is not entirely known. What does seem to be increasingly evident, however, is the indication that digital interactive tools, from social media to more sophisticated DH projects, have as important a role to play in environmental justice as they do in social justice which seems to be the more prevalent current DH cause.

Knowing that the production, manufacture, waste, and energetic requirement of our digital media devices are actively contributing to the earth’s progressively detrimental state, those of us teaching with technologies, especially those of us teaching socially-minded DH-specific or DH-inflected courses, should take a moment to consider how we might ground those technologies in their own particular environmental contexts, and how we might use those technologies to interrogate—and effectively communicate—today’s important environmental issues.

-Amanda Starling Gould
@stargould

Featured image of President Obama courtesy of CNN.com.

This Week: Justice and Equality at the University

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• September 2, 2015

Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Renee McGarry.

This month the HASTAC project The University Worth Fighting For deals specifically with classroom pedagogies of equality and invites readers to comment on how they move toward more equal pedagogies in their own classroom practices. The initiative also hosted a live-streamed workshop on August 28, which was recorded and can be followed on Twitter at #fight4edu. Future months will deal with other issues facing the university of the 21st century, hopefully including the broader themes I discuss below.

In her opening essay, Futures Initiative fellow Danica Savonick asks, “What would a classroom look like if it were designed not to reproduce traditional hierarchies of privilege and power, but instead to produce justice and equity?” I’d like to make one simple change to this question to reframe the conversation: “What would a classroom university look like if it were designed not to reproduce traditional hierarchies of privilege and power, but instead to produce justice and equity?” Because while what we do in our classrooms matters, it matters less and less if the neoliberal university continues to reproduce power structures that disempower students and faculty while empowering administrators and donors in a way that interferes with teaching, learning, and research. It’s important that we develop a classroom dynamic “in which those historically marginalized and dispossessed by the social order can instead thrive and flourish” but we also must recognize that those in the front of the classroom may be, and increasingly should be, a part of the same historically disempowered groups and that the ways in which instructors (tenure-track and contingent alike) are associated with and participate in the neoliberal university are diverse and oftentimes involuntary.

And while I’m heartened by the focus on pedagogy in the past decade, we also need to address very concrete problems that come with it: the division this creates within universities between those who “care about” teaching and those who “don’t”, the feminization of this particular kind of labor and the association of women with teaching and its associated emotional labor, a divide between teaching schools where pedagogy is foregrounded and oftentimes more elite schools where it isn’t, and the fact that for most instructors – over 50% of them in fact – revising teaching methodologies and classroom structures is completely unpaid labor, as the neoliberal university continues to hire contingent instructors with no job security and pay them (often too little) by classroom hours. Our classrooms are microcosms of higher education, and the direction of higher education matters for our classrooms. When thinking about equality I encourage instructors to think narrowly about our classrooms, but also broadly about the system in which our classrooms exist. As the director of the Futures Initiative, Cathy Davidson, said during the workshop, “The only way you can counteract structural inequality is by structural equality.” This fight is multifaceted. We are rapidly losing the battle for a system that empowers faculty and students, and classrooms that aim for for equality can provide a three hour break for students and faculty alike, but it’s oftentimes just a break from a system that churns on without their well-being in mind.

• The Reason You Saw the Virginia Shooting Video Even If You Didn’t Want To
• How to Stop Autoplay on Facebook and Twitter (If you’re asking/requiring students to use social media in your classroom please share this with them.)
• Grasping at the Root Conference (with readings)
• Occupy the Syllabus

• Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning
  • “In all things, all tasks, all jobs, women are expected to perform affective labor – caring, listening, smiling, reassuring, comforting, supporting. This work is not valued; often it is unpaid. But affective labor has become a core part of the teaching profession – even though it is, no doubt, “inefficient.””
• Grief Work
  • “Despite the tech-speculative fiction that posits a future of leisure, the future of work, so it seems, will increasingly be contingent, precarious; and as such, it’s hard to see how it will be anything other than an unhealthy one – physically, mentally.”

• And from the archives: A 2008 poster and educational tool designed by Jesse Goldstein, David Spataro, and Stephen Boatwright for the CUNY Adjunct Project that hits at the heart of the impact of the marriage of capitalism and higher education on CUNY classrooms