Standardizing Culture & Data Archeology

In-Class Agenda

• Discuss the assigned readings.
• Group presentations for Critical Cultural Data Explorations.
• Time permitting: answer questions about the Python Refresher lesson and work on group projects.

Assigned Materials

• Lee, Benjamin. “Compounded Mediation: A Data Archaeology of the Newspaper Navigator Dataset.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 015, no. 4 (December 7, 2021). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/4/000578/000578.html.
• Explore the Newspaper Navigator Project https://news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/.

Additional Materials

• Loukissas, Yanni Alexander. “Collecting Infrastructures.” In All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society. The MIT Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11543.001.0001.
• Adams, Hannah Alpert. “Machine Reading the Primeros Libros.” Digital Humanities Quarterly (2017). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/4/000268/000268.html.
• Cordell, Ryan. “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously.” Book History (2017). https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bh.2017.0006.

Additional Links

• For those interested here is the documented dataset for Newspaper Naviagor: Lee, Benjamin Charles Germain, Jaime Mears, Eileen Jakeway, Meghan Ferriter, Chris Adams, Nathan Yarasavage, Deborah Thomas, Kate Zwaard, and Daniel S. Weld. “The Newspaper Navigator Dataset: Extracting Headlines and Visual Content from 16 Million Historic Newspaper Pages in Chronicling America.” In Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management, 3055–62. Virtual Event Ireland: ACM, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1145/3340531.3412767.
• And here is the code for Newspaper Navigator: https://github.com/LibraryOfCongress/newspaper-navigator.
• Link to map and timeline of Chroncling America newspapers https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/ and https://loc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/media/index.html?appid=3c6a392554d545bdb1c083348ef56458&center=-97.5126;39.6376&level=3.
• A brief visual history of MARC cataloging at the Library of Congress by Ben Schmidt https://benschmidt.org/sappingattention/a-brief-visual-history-of-marc/ and timeline of MARC changes from Thomale, Jason. “Interpreting MARC: Where’s the Bibliographic Data?” The Code4Lib Journal, no. 11 (September 21, 2010). https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/3832. Also the Library of Congress’s MARC Guidelines https://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/um01to06.html.
• The original Beyond Words project https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2017/09/introducing-beyond-words/. Though it has since been retired in 2021 https://labs.loc.gov/work/experiments/beyond-words/, you can see some of the data in the Newspaper Navigator GitHub repository https://github.com/LibraryOfCongress/newspaper-navigator/tree/master/beyond_words_data.
• Digitized version of The Crisis magazine https://modjourn.org/journal/crisis/.
• Viral Texts Project https://viraltexts.org/visualizations/.
• Example of Image Searching and Clustering with PixPlot https://labs.statsbiblioteket.dk/pixplot/
• Excavating AI Project by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen https://excavating.ai/ that explores the materiality of AI and specifically ImageNet.

Assignments

Individual

Group

• Critical Cultural Data Explorations