Week One Reflection
We established a weekly meeting between Sarah Ketchley, James Tucker of the University of Toronto and Vincent Wilson, an undergraduate student with UW who will be focusing on some of the programming aspects of the project, and myself. We also established another weekly meeting every Wednesday morning just between myself and Sarah Ketchley in order to focus on the progress of the DFW.
A good deal of the meeting was focused on defining the goals of the project and possible approaches that will ensure that our work will be preserved and retrievable regardless of the evolution of the project's scope. This planning ranged from what database management software we could use that would allow us to graduate to larger servers if the project develops and expands, as well as deciding on workspaces for developing the project like Jupyter and Github.
My first assignment for the DFW was to complete a text mining analysis of Volume 17 of the EBA (Emma B. Andrews) repository. This was in the interest of understanding how we will code parts of speech tagging in order to more accurately define what relationship the author has with the people she mentions in her writing. This can be separated into formal and informal designations by the use of prefixes, as well as group identifiers and people mentioned anecdotally rather than accounting an in-person interaction. I ran Volume 17 and then more and more specific sections of the text through the open source text analysis tool Voyant in order to make some initial observations and create visualizations that can be viewed on the Technical and Theoretical Research section of this site.
The Wednesday meeting was also very beneficial in helping refine my Learning Outcomes for the class. This involved making the technical goals more critical and broad, i.e. instead of focusing on how to use a list of different platforms, acquire a general understanding on all of the tools in a specific field in order to find which will be most appropriate for each type of project. I also added a learning outcome around social progress to design the network visualization with inclusivity and accessibility to all future researchers. This was an element of a course I took this Winter but I am excited to learn more about the theory and tools behind the practice and gain hands-on experience in the design process. So far, inclusive UX design is making up the majority of my reading material for week two.
An assignment for week two is to create and distribute around four rough sketches of potential models for the network visualizations, distributing and getting feedback from other team members. I plan on implementing at least a few of the design thinking techniques that I learned in LIS 547 this past year.
Reading:
ARCE GA Lecture - Zoom. https://emory.zoom.us/rec/play/kyIlIkxvrpYHqd992u_iu_mZkbTtGr7ueZkM4Z0PfocKIRLJZSYUUjNv_9-GANEvnO9W6Kt_TEZUranu.TLN_KNSXQLx1XSEz?continueMode=true&_x_zm_rtaid=M5vA9UgSTXOWVmIAqAUTWw.1624475071517.6d281081c9c69a52f18c82f3a1990237&_x_zm_rhtaid=443. Accessed 23 June 2021.
Brughmans, Tom. “Thinking Through Networks: A Review of Formal Network Methods in Archaeology.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, vol. 20, no. 4, Dec. 2013, pp. 623–62. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1007/s10816-012-9133-8.
Emma B. Andrews Diary. https://trveg01.s.uw.edu/exist/apps/emmabandrews/volume17.xml. Accessed 28 June 2021.
Schedule (May 2021) — Teaching Text Analysis with Constellate. https://ithaka.github.io/tdm-notebooks/book/schedule.html. Accessed 23 June 2021.