Week Five Reflection
During week four I proposed a way to approach categorizing the figures in the EBA Diary into occupational fields. Since that initial draft, the conversation and feedback from team members as well as professional contacts has influenced me to gain a better understanding of social network analysis theory. I had been approaching this project mainly in terms of UX Design as opposed to sociology and I realized that some of the decisions that I was proposing for the Fields View might have an outsized impact on the way the repository is interpreted by researchers.
One element I needed to learn more about is how figures that are listed under multiple fields should be recorded. While there were quite a few ways to approach this problem that I detail in the Gephi section, I ultimately found that the figures should be listed in each of the fields they are identified with, sans qualifiers. This necessarily reduces the amount of detail in the network visualization, but I feel this is the most neutral way we can construct the guide. Quantifying how much of someone's life they spend between banking, excavating and collecting art, for example, is prone to conjecture, whereas displaying the figures under each of their fields allows the researcher to make their own judgements about how that person likely spent most of their time.
Another sensitive decision I needed to do more research on was the inclusion of spouses in the field of their partner. I made this decision based off of the high degree of connectedness of social circles while traveling on the Nile, and the multiple instances I have read so far in the EBA diaries as well as the Mary Newberry collected letters, wherein wives and partners often acted as social intermediaries between the male parties, hosting tea and. dinner gatherings. While Sarah Ketchley supported this idea, I did receive feedback that linking female partners to their spouse's field might be perceived as diminishing their historical agency. Out of the 30 some resources I have read since the first proposal, I haven't found any journals or book chapters that address this decision in social network analysis directly. That said, I will be writing a methodology paper for the project and I still plan on making a case for this decision and backing it up with multiple examples from the repository of female figures proactively acting as social liaisons and lead to future partnerships between male figures.
I also had the pleasure to meet with Verletta Kern, the director of the Open Scholarship Commons, and hold an informational interview. We talked about networking opportunities and possible pathways into more traditional institutions for those interested in digital scholarship/humanities. This included looking out for titles like digital scholarship librarian, data visualization librarian and assessment librarian. Verletta also had some great suggestions for list serves to join and grants to look out for. I will absolutely be looking into the CLIR Recordings at Risk grant with the Tacoma Public Library, who I am already partnering with for a VRAF's internship award this year.
Reading:
Collar, Anna, et al. “Networks in Archaeology: Phenomena, Abstraction, Representation.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, vol. 22, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 1–32. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1007/s10816-014-9235-6.
Engebretsen, Martin, and Kennedy Helen, editors. Data Visualization in Society. Amsterdam University Press, 2020. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.5117/9789463722902.
Engebretsen, Martin, and Helen Kennedy, editors. Approaching Data Visualizations as Interfaces: An Empirical Demonstration of How Data Are Imag(in)e. Amsterdam University Press, 2020. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.2307/j.ctvzgb8c7.
Mirel, Barbara. “Building Network Visualization Tools to Facilitate Metacognition in Complex Analysis.” Leonardo, vol. 44, no. 3, June 2011, pp. 248–49. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1162/LEON_a_00176.
Moody, James, et al. “Dynamic Network Visualization.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 110, no. 4, Jan. 2005, pp. 1206–41. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1086/421509.
Venturini, Tommaso, et al. “11. How to Tell Stories with Networks: Exploring the Narrative Affordances of Graphs with the Iliad.” The Datafied Society, edited by Mirko Tobias Schäfer and Karin van Es, Amsterdam University Press, 2017, pp. 155–70. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1515/9789048531011-014.