Author: Stacy Takacs

Professor of English and American Studies Oklahoma State University 700 N. Greenwood Ave Tulsa, OK 74106-0700 stacy.takacs@okstate.edu

Blog Post 14

Use this FINAL post to reflect back over the semester in the course.

What did you learn this semester, or what will you take away with you? What aspects of the course did you find most helpful, and which activities would you recommend changing? What did we NOT cover that you might have liked to learn? How did you like (or not) the contract grading arrangement? Etc.

In addition to reflecting on the course design, you should also reflect on your own participation and execution. What are you most proud of having accomplished this semester? Do you have any regrets or feelings that you missed an opportunity? If you had to describe the skills you learned in this class to a job recruiter, what would you say?

This blog should be reflective and comprehensive, looking back over the whole course. Because your name is attached to your post, it is not the best place to rant and rave, but constructive feedback is always welcome. Ranting and raving can be done on the Student Survey of Instruction, which is blinded.

This Post will be due when the final projects are due: Thursday May 6 by noon

4/27-4/29 Work on Omeka Projects

4/27 Omeka Project

Work on Omeka Exhibit

GRAD STUDENTS ONLY: Your draft #Syllabus or Digital Supplement is due by 10 am. Send me the link via email

Comment on your peers’ blogs

4/29 Omeka Project – Everyone Meet Today

 Guest: Lynn Wallace, Library Director, OSU Tulsa Library (I hope she can visit, anyway)

Omeka Exhibit Presentation and Critique

Blog Post 14 due by 10 am. See the course blog for the topic.

Blog Post 13

After our discussion of structure on Tuesday, you should have some sense of what your contribution to the course exhibit will be. Take space in this post to strategize about how to execute your portion. I’d like you to:

(1) Identify your goals for the page or section you have selected–What do you hope to accomplish with your contribution? What mistakes do you hope to avoid? How will you try to control for these possible missteps?

(2) Identify the aspects of the project you are most worried about and ask for help. How can your peers assist you in your mission? With relevant secondary sources? appropriate passages from The Burning? details of the events that you’re still sketchy about? other primary sources or collections that might be useful? ideas for organizing your thoughts or “hooking” the audience? etc.

(3) Identify and analyze at least one primary source from the Ruth Sigler Avery collection that you might use to convey information or tell your part of the story. Embed the image or artifact into your post if possible. Then explain how you will incorporate the artifact. How will you feature it? How will you describe and/or caption it? And, perhaps most importantly, what is your analysis of this item? Give us a sample of what you might say. Some questions to consider: What does the image or document show? What do we want visitors to recognize in it or about it? What lessons do we want them to take away from an encounter with the artifact?

This post will be due BEFORE CLASS on Thursday. That gives you a little extra time to find an artifact and think about its meaning vis-a-vis your part of the project.

4/13-4/15 Readings and Assignments

4/13 Wellness Day – No Class

Keep reading Madigan’s, The Burning (I’d recommend chaps 11-12)

4/15 Omeka Project – Everyone Meet Today

Guest – Quyrash Ali Lansana, poet, activist and Tulsa Artists Fellow will discuss the history of the Greenwood District with us.

Read:

  • Tim Madigan, The Burning, Chapters 11-16 (72 pp)

Due: All contributions to the Zotero Resource Collection

Blog Post 12 due by 10 am. Post your bibliography and discuss your contributions to the Resource Collection. See the course blog for more details about the topic.

Blog Post 12

In this week’s blog post, you will report on your resource collection.

As reminder, you were to identify and add at least FIVE relevant resources—digital archives or repositories, digital projects, scholarly books or articles, newspaper articles, maps/images/videos of quality and relevance, etc.—to our shared Zotero library for the Tulsa Race Massacre Project. Any assigned texts–Tim Madigan’s The Burning, the #TulsaSyllabus itself, lectures by Dr. Alicia Odewale, Quyrash Ali Lansana, and other materials–cannot be added by students, but some of the collections these authors/scholars cite may be! You may not duplicate references already collected in the shared library, so do look through what’s contained in the library before uploading your own references. You may need to dig deeper to find a few new options.  

Once you have added your materials to Zotero, create what is effectively an annotated bibliography. Using Zotero, compile a bibliography of your five (or more) sources (if you need help click here); then write a 300+ word blog post that lists these sources in MLA format, explains their strengths and weaknesses, and describes how the resources might contribute to our TRM project. How might we use each source to enrich the project?

This post will be due on 4/15 by 10 am.

Blog Post 11

This week we will learn how to use Omeka-S to build online exhibits. It is very important that you be present for class on Thursday, as you will not have another opportunity to learn the basics about Omeka-S.

Your blog post for this week should identify a model exhibit, from among those assigned this week, which could be used as a guide for our own online exhibits. Choose an exhibit that you think is particularly effective and explain why you think it’s effective. What questions does the exhibit seek to answer? How does its selection and arrangement informational resources work to answer those questions? Is there a narrative, or story, to the exhibit? If so, how is the story told? If not, what other techniques are used to “hook” visitors and keep them engaged?

You should conclude your post with a brief paragraph describing features you’d like to see our online exhibit(s) contain. How should we utilize primary sources? Are there visualization tools or techniques you’d like to see integrated into the project? How should the site, as a whole, be organized (i.e. how should our individual exhibit pages be linked)? Use this final paragraph to think aloud about what would make our exhibit(s) most effective.

Blog posts will be due by 10 am on Thursday 4/8, as usual. Please do submit on time this week, as we will want to use these posts as springboards for our in-class discussion of how to organize our exhibits.

4/6-4/8 Readings and Assignments

4/6 Tulsa Race Massacre Project – Grad Student Meeting

Read:

  • Madigan, The Burning, Chaps. 8-10 (41 pp)
  • Miriam Posner, “How did they Make That?” (re-read this, please. The questions it asks about project-building will guide the blog post for the week)

Compare:

To at least TWO of the following:

GRAD STUDENTS ONLY: Proposal for your #Syllabus or Digital Supplement Project is due today. You will present your proposal during our class meeting(also submit a written version to me via email). 

EVERYONE: Comment on your peers’ blogs

4/8 Introducing Omeka – Everyone Meet Today

Watch:

Workshop: Using Omeka – Guest Megan Macken

Blog Post 11 Due by 10 am. See the course blog for the topic.

Blog Post 10

We are going to have different assignments and different due dates for the undergraduate and graduate students this week. Please pay attention to the instructions that apply to you!

UNDERGRADUATES: I’d like you to experiment with and review one of the following sites. Using the tools on the site, what sorts of data visualizations can you produce? Do a screen grab, if possible, and upload the images to your blog post for illustration. Keeping in mind our recent discussions of how maps can lie and the reading from Charlotte Fillmore-Handlon (“5 Things Data Cannot Do”), what can you find out about the datasets used in these projects? What potential limitations or problems do you think researchers ought to be aware of? What can you NOT do with these data, in other words? The two projects you can use for this post are:

  • Robots Reading Vogue (Yale U) – Read about the project, first; then use the “experiments” tab at the top to produce some data visualizations. What can and can’t you do? What should researchers keep in mind when using this site?
  • Project Arclight (U Wisconsin) – Project Arclight works with the Lantern Media History Digital Library, a database of digitized trade publications from the early 20th century (things like Variety, Broadcasting, and film fan magazines), to produce data visualizations using the collections. You might want to play with the Lantern database, first, to find a fruitful topic; then head to ArcLight to try out the visualization tools available there. I’d recommend searching fan magazines for early film stars (Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, etc.) or finding movie reviews for an old film you like (Wizard of Oz, for example, or Casablanca). There is a free guidebook for ArcLight, available here if you don’t know where to start.

Undergraduate blog posts will be due by 10 am on Thursday as usual. Note that learning how the sites work may take some time, so do leave yourself time to play around on the sites.

GRADUATE STUDENTS: Build a rudimentary social network graph, using the “Network Template” in Flourish and a dataset you construct for the project. I will give you two options:

  1. Create a spreadsheet depicting the relationships between at least 3 of the families discussed in Tim Madigan’s The Burning. Try to select families with some overlap, i.e. direct relationships. Detailed instructions here.
  2. Create a spreadsheet depicting the relationships between characters from a short story, book, TV show, or film you have recently consumed. For example, you could map the relationships between each of the customers serviced by “The Guy” in an episode of HBO’s High Maintenance, or you could graph who runs into whom and how on an episode of Seinfeld, etc. There are many options here; feel free to be creative. Detailed instructions here.

Once you have your dataset, head back to “Flourish” and create a network graph for your groups. Take screenshots of the graph to use in your blog post. then reflect on the process. First, analyze your network. What do you notice about the relationships that might be salient? What should viewers of your graph take away from it? Then, consider the process of network graphing as a mode of humanistic inquiry. What uses do you see for network graphs? What limitations do you see? What did you learn about the process from having created your own such graph? Are there any lessons about constructing, and working with, datasets that you’d like to share? Any connections to the conversations we’ve recently been having about the fungibility of data, for example?

Because you (graduate students) have to construct your own dataset, I will give you until Sunday, April 4 by 11:59 pm to complete this week’s blog post. However, Sunday is also Easter, so you might want to take that into account as you plan your time.

3/30-4/1 Readings and Assignments

3/30 Data Visualization II: Networks, Charts, and Graphs — Grad Student Meeting

Event: Q&A with Shalini Kantayya, director of Coded Bias. Register here to receive the link: https://okstate.libcal.com/calendar/events/codedbiasfilmmaker

Read:

  • Tim Madigan, The Burning, Chapters 5-7 (39 pp)

Watch:

Optional:

Optional Workshop: Data Visualization and Network Analysis (undergrads let me know if you want to join; Grad students, this is required)

If you are really interested in learning about data visualization and how to do it well, I’d recommend Nathan Yau’s book Data Points.

Your part of the Digitization Project is due by 10 am. Comment on your peers’ blogs

Comment on your peers’ blogs

4/1 Data Visualization, cont. – Everyone Meet Today

Read:

Examine:

Watch:

Optional:

Blog Post 10 due by 10 am. See the course blog for the topic.

Blog Post 9

Discuss your initial reaction to the film Coded Bias. Again, you may view the film for free by registering at this link: https://okstate.libcal.com/calendar/events/codedbias.

To hone your response, draw on insights gained from Ruha Benjamin’s more theoretical and context-rich discussion in Race After Technology. What can or should we learn about the links between technology, systemic racism and social (in)justice? What struck you? What will you take away from these readings/screenings and why? What parts of the argument(s) seem to need further development?

As a part of your post, identify one question you’d like to put to the filmmaker, Shalini Kantayya. When you register for the Q&A with the filmmaker, you should enter that question in the form, as well. If you’ve already registered and didn’t get to give your question, I will pass it on. You should identify a question for the filmmaker even if you cannot make the Q&A.

If possible, you should complete your blog post by 10 am on Thursday 3/25. If you need more time to view the film, let me know.

3/23-3/25 Readings and Assignments

3/23 Data Visualization I: Maps – Everyone Meet Today

EVENT: Screening of Coded Bias (all week, at your leisure). To receive the link to view the film, you must register here.

Do also register for the Q&A with the filmmaker if you can make it on March 30 at 6 pm.

We will meet virtually on BOTH Tuesday AND Thursday this week. Recordings of Tuesday’s session will be made available to those with a conflict.

Guest: Sean Thomas, PhD Candidate in Geography at OSU.

Sean will discuss his ArcGIS project “Mapping Greenwood.” He will briefly explain what ArcGIS is, how his project developed, what he hoped to achieve, and what he has discovered thus far. He will also introduce your digitization project, which involves some hand-written fire insurance records he is using to build his map.

Read:

Optional:

Comment on your peers’ blogs

3/25 Lying with Maps — Everyone Meet Today

Guest – Kevin Dyke, Mapping and Spatial Data Librarian, OSU Edmon Low Library

Read:

Examine:

Blog Post 9 due by 10 am. See the course blog for the topic.

Blog Post 8

Undergraduate students, your assignment for this week is to remediate the metadata assigned to 3-4 images from the Ruth Sigler Avery Tulsa Race Massacre collection held at the OSU Tulsa library. The link to the files containing the images can be found in your Okstate email inbox. If you don’t have it, please email me or Madison Chartier.

Graduate students, your assignment is to generate metadata for the Dick Rowland court case, which is a new addition to the collections.

Using what you have learned about ways to center the subjects and describe with care, even as you attempt to make materials discoverable by visitors to the collection, revise the metadata associated with your selected imagery or files. Then, in your blog, reflect on the readings from 3/9-3/11 and the process of remediating that metadata.

What did you learn from that process? What patterns of presence/absence, power/disempowerment did you notice in the metadata? How did you handle questions about specificity and generality, missing context, locations and personages, etc? Were the recommendations provided in the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia: Anti-Racist Description Resources helpful to you, and, if so, how? If not, why not? Are there things you would add to the list of recommendations, having now worked with some archival images yourself? Your response may take on other issues, but these are some suggestions to get you started.

You should complete your remediation, and this blog post by 10 am on Thursday 3/18.

3/16-3/18 Readings and Assignments

3/16 Encoding Bias in Digital Culture — Grad Student Meeting

Watch:

Read:

Optional: Even for Grad Students this week. But I do HIGHLY recommend the boyd and Crawford piece

Given the metadata exercise and the self-reflective nature of last week’s blog posts, you can skip commenting this week

3/18 Decoding Bias in Digital Culture – Everyone Meet Today

Read:

  • Ruha Benjamin, “Chapter 2” and “Chapter 3” in Race After Technology

Optional (but highly recommended):

  • Ruha Benjamin, “Chapter 5”

Metadata Remediation due by 11:59 pm – submit your final additions or edits by 10 am

Blog Post 8 due by 11:59 pm. You will reflect on the metadata remediation exercise. See the course blog for more details about the topic.