Project Ideas - Manuel & Maryam

changed due date to March 09, 2020

added Mutual help project labels

So far I haven't really found a good project idea unfortunately, as it's still not very clear to me how I could possibly combine the "digital history" aspect with a tangible historical project. A few subject area interests came to mind, but as these digital tools are new to me I wouldn't know if they were of any use in this pursuit.

But @maryam.joseph and I were interested in collaborating on a project, perhaps connecting it to the other Contemporary History "exercise" about archives and museums. Surely, by combining our brain powers we should come up with an enriching project idea soon. Some input by others, especially on the digital aspects required for a project would probably pretty helpful since we're pretty unsure what is expected. Perhaps we can talk about that tomorrow in class.

I'm interested in how objects and images have been displayed in museums in the past and how the changing contexts outside of the museum have changed the way they are displayed now.

A couple of notes I thought of for you, or anyone thinking about objects.

In some branches of linguistics (i.e. the good ones) there are some relevant ideas:

"realisation" in language is an interesting concept. meaning/semantics is realised through words/grammar, which in turn are realised by phonemes (i.e. sounds), which are realised by speech organs and so on. At a higher level of abstraction than meaning/semantics are ideas like discourse and 'register', which is basically, 'what kind of interaction/text this is', done in a kind of structured analysis of the language use.

Also interesting is the linguistic process of nominalisation (from diagnose to diagnosis, making something into a noun). This can be called a grammatical metaphor. Functionally speaking, it is the representation of a process as a thing, a term analogous to object. Notice that we differentiate and maintain a division between form (noun) and function (thing). Academic language does this a lot: it is highly nominalised, because once we convert (i.e. realise as) processes and qualities to things (fast -> speed), we get all kinds of new grammatical options for how we can talk about them. We can compare them, we can make carry out processes, we can modify them with adjectives, and so on. The language of science is basically the attempt to represent everything as an object, and make all processes into relational ones (being, having, seeming, appearing, etc).

In Python, "object" is literally the most foundational construct, with everything else inheriting properties from object. If I wanted to make a duck in Python, I'd probably define some classes like this:

class Animal(object):
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
        self.flora = False
        self.fauna = True
        self.has_spine = None  # maybe or maybe not, neither true not false
        self.sound_it_makes = None  # also maybe or maybe not

    def speak(self):
        if self.sound_it_makes:
            print(self.sound_it_makes)
        else:
            raise ValueError('This animal cannot speak!')

class Bird(Animal):
    def __init__(self, name):
        super().__init__(name)
        self.sound_it_makes = "cheep cheep"
        self.has_spine = True
        self.has_wings = True
        self.can_fly = True
        self.waterbird = None   # maybe or maybe not, neither true not false

class Duck(Bird):
    def __init__(self, name):
        super().__init__(name)
        self.waterbird = True
        self.sound_it_makes = "quack quack"

Then I'd instantiate/realise my bird with code like this:

jeff_the_duck = Duck("jeff")  # make an instance from the defined class
jeff_the_duck.name  # answers "jeff"
jeff_the_duck.waterbird  # answers True
jeff_the_duck.has_wings  # answers True
jeff_the_duck.flora  # answers False
jeff_the_duck.speak()
quack quack
isinstance(jeff_the_duck, Animal)  # answers True

It may take a bit of time as a non-Python programmer to see what's going on, but this is how a programming language might conceptualise an object (especially, an object-oriented language like Python). I recreate a kind of animal taxonony, introducing more specific concepts for more specific animal types, but also inheriting the earlier properties, so that ducks get all bird properties, and all animal properties. I also create a method (an action this object can perform), speak, which will print the defined sound_it_makes, if one is defined.

I believe the example above is fairly self-explanatory, except for super(), which means, run the code for the parent object, from which this one derived (i.e. make sure a duck is a kind of bird, which is a kind of animal).

changed title from Project Ideas - Manuel to Project Ideas - Manuel & Maryam

assigned to @maryam.joseph and unassigned @manuel.kissoczy

Inspired by the Global Japan lecture this morning (@martin.dusinberre), Manuel and I thought of a different project idea: We would like to work on something with maps and try to visualize trading routes.

We're interested in shedding light onto the lesser known Indian Ocean slave trade – focal point Mauritius – and its integration in this trade network. Slaves coming from the African continent and India to Mauritiuan sugar plantations and sugar being brought to Europe (?).

Right now we are thinking about how to get the sources for a project like this.

For the rest of this course: Maybe we could do something with GIS and mapping to help with the project?

mentioned in issue #26

Considering the fact that @manuel.kissoczy will probably soon get summoned by the army, i had some other project ideas/thought/questions. I'm just gonna place them here. Manuel, if you don't have to go after all you are oviously also welcome to work on these new ideas.

I have a lot of friends/relatives who are currently at the front (yes, war analogy intented). Like for example Manuel or my aunt who is a doctor in Italy, my best friend who is a Nurse here...I asked myself some questions: How will future historians – or maybe us in 10/20/30 years look at the year 2020? What sources will we have to work with? Do we rely on Oral History sources? Is everyone of us a source? Problem: Everything is online. Of course, the analog newspapers will (probably) end up in an Archive. But what happens with all of our Whatsapp Conversations, our Video Calls, Online News? I see a lot of people keeping a "diary" on Instagram Stories. But these disappear after 24 hours... Because these will be the important sources for future historians, right? How can we deal with this right now?

Also: Did historians during let's say...the First World War also "worry" about future historians and how they will analyze everything? Did they also feel like they were making history just by living during a historical event?

And: What happens to history writing if the enemy is invisible? How does a society deal with this? Obviously the society is not dealing very well because no one seems to be able to just sit at home! I hear a lot of people saying that they are annoyed by all the entire Corona Topic. Did people during the Spanish Flu say the same thing or is it just our 21.century society that is fucked up like this? This sounds like a rant, oops.

I would like to raise even more questions: What happens to the voiceless during a global crisis? How will they be remembered?

I feel like these are all things that we right now have to take into account. What happens to history if everything is digital? For me these questions all go into "digitzed history". That being said: What is the difference between digital and digitized? What happens to all the digital sources if the Internet breaks? Should we, as historians, even "worry" about stuff like this or should we only deal with the past?

@martin.dusinberre & @daniel.mcdonald I would be very happy to hear your remarks on some of this because this has been on my mind the last couple of days. I don't know if any of this might lead to a digital project but I somehow hope that I can work with/on these questions.

@maryam.joseph Great questions, and very important ones, too. I'll try to add a few thoughts tomorrow but in the meantime, to the question of why I called this course "digitized" as opposed to "digital", you might want to look at this great article by Lara Putnam on the Transnational and the Text-Searchable (2016). You might recognize it from having played the beta version of the game... I think its argument for why we should be talking about a "digitized" world is compelling. More tomorrow, I hope. Oh, and one other suggestion (with some caution) on whether previous generations were annoyed/panicked about the outbreak of previous crises: Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker. If you can get your hands on it, you might find its writing style very stimulating/provocative (@daniel.mcdonald you might find this writing style very interesting, too).

Ah yes, I remember Putnams article from the "Writing History" Class – I have to re-read it! And thanks for the book suggestion. I will try and order it and read it (with some caution, of course).

I think the project sounds interesting, would love to see it carried through to completion.

Just want to point out that I have no particular skills in mapping/anything visual, so do remember to make sure the expertise exists somewhere. I used to work alongside someone who taught a tool which was then called CartoDB, now might be at: https://carto.com/ . I did the class once, but things seem to have changed a lot since then, and I wasn't much into it anyway.

Also, IIRC, one of the main non-linguistic uses of topic modelling was to group trade routes (i.e. which are related somehow?). If anybody wants me to track down the paper I can, it basically tried to show how topic modeller works with numerical data, not just text. I think the point was to have a machine that could, if given voyage data, predict what the purpose of the voyage was (i.e. slavery, or something else).

I found this project that is related to the questions that I've raised about the current situation. And there is also a git-thingy about that.

@maryam.joseph Great: what you're looking at are some of the Hackathon projects that have been launched in the last few weeks--effectively, very intensive efforts on the part of programmers (and hackers) to try and pool their skills to find IT solutions to a range of problems thrown up by COVID-19. So what you need to think about is some kind of research question, e.g. how are these civil society efforts using digital technology qualitatively different from, say, civil society effors to combat the 1918 Spanish flu? That's not a very interesting question (the answer is probably some variation on "very different"), but it might be a start. At least it gives you a sense that the methodology might have to be comparative.

@all So sorry for posting this quite late - we couldn't agree on the perfect article to introduce our project! If you have time in the next 24 hours to read this short-ish article (in German ), it's a good introduction into the topic: https://www.republik.ch/2020/04/13/die-tatsache-einer-pandemie-in-europa-das-ist-ein-zustand-auf-den-wir-emotional-nicht-vorbereitet-sind

We'll have more background articles linked in our presentation tomorrow and can't wait to present our ideas to you to get some constructive feedback!

unassigned @maryam.joseph

@martin.dusinberre @daniel.mcdonald @leyla.feiner @henrik.jochum @patrick.gut @ricardo.stalder

Can we get a 2 minute English summary tomorrow morning? @manuel.kissoczy

By the way, I'm just 'auditing' the classes to follow, don't expect too much from me but tech problems answered and so on. This is sfor purely contractual reasons; if I had my way I'd be posting non-stop here on digizeit, it's a great little community.

Absolutely! @daniel.mcdonald

Thanks again for your feedback today, @martin.dusinberre , @patrick.gut, @henrik.jochum & @leyla.feiner! And thanks for auditing, @daniel.mcdonald . Here is the Link to our Repository

I am not entirely sure if this is the "correct" way to share a repository.

@ricardo.stalder: you are also welcome to check out our project!

You can share a repo any way you like. And you can use the settings to control who can do what with it. I believe anyone who can see it can fork, make changes and submit PRs, so you don't need to grant people total ownership if you don't want.

If anyone has time until tomorrow: We added a ReadMe to our Repo with our Research Question(s) and we also organized everything a bit. If you don't have time we can quickly show you everything tomorrow.

Do I have to tag everyone so people will see this post? @daniel.mcdonald @martin.dusinberre @henrik.jochum @ricardo.stalder @patrick.gut @leyla.feiner

I have looked at your Repo, sounds interesting!

One thing I'm not entirely sure about is the (implied) distinction of analog and digital, what does this mean precisely? Is this a relevant distinction nowadays when more or less every "paper" is in some ways digital or has digital aspects to it?

ENGLISH VERSION BELOW

...

oops, the english version is in the making, @manuel.kissoczy somehow found something more interesting to do than translating. unbelievable!

something else: do you have time tomorrow to help us with some git related questions, @daniel.mcdonald ?

i believe we're up to date on tech support right now? let me know if you need anything else though. last i saw, you had some superfluous .gitkeep files in your repo that could be deleted, that's the only thing on the top of my head @maryam.joseph

@daniel.mcdonald We tried to make a Webpage out of our repo but the instructions where way to complicated and we didn't manage to do it. Do you have time for a call today?

I could do a call this afternoon. What kind of page do you want to make? readthedocs style (like the lives in transit writers' guide), or using GitLab Pages, or GitHub Pages ... ?

This afternoon sounds good. What time? I think we would want to do something using GitLab Pages. But does it even make sense to do that now or should we wait until the "end" of our project?

your best bet is to set it up as soon as possible so you can see if/how it works. then you can populate it with more content up till project end.

i will try to make a GitLab pages for the digizeit repo, you could then copy from there...

16:00?

@daniel.mcdonald 16:00 works!

I might be a few minutes late, got to reset my Teams authentication. @manuel.kissoczy