Map visualization
1 2021-12-01T20:35:50-08:00 Amy Lueck 557d200a410ce28daf395646ea7883ee44337c9e 39728 1 Spatial visualization of collaborators and texts in anthology project plain 2021-12-01T20:35:50-08:00 Amy Lueck 557d200a410ce28daf395646ea7883ee44337c9eThis page has tags:
- 1 2022-02-05T14:31:23-08:00 Teresa Contino 0b2bed8aa9c7a37efb70737c883238f6591a58ce Visualizations Amy Lueck 6 Provides a list of pages that embed or refer to visualizations plain 2022-02-17T10:57:04-08:00 Amy Lueck 557d200a410ce28daf395646ea7883ee44337c9e
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2021-11-17T14:07:56-08:00
People as Feminist Praxis
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2023-06-26T14:49:56-07:00
It was important to us to involve multiple authors in the creation of our text, and also to make that work visible for users. As scholars like Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford (2001), Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Jones Royster (2010), and others have articulated, collaboration is a feminist praxis and value. Others in Digital Humanities, like Mary Catherine Coker and Kate Ozmet (2019), Gabrielle Griffin and Matthew Hayler (2018), and Courtney Rivard, Taylor Arnold, and Lauren Tilton (2019), have extended this observation, particularly to digital work, where it is even more commonly the case that multiple people, even very large project teams, come together to produce projects. We followed Lindal Buchanan's (2003) definition of collaboration as "a cooperative endeavor involving two or more people that results in a rhetorical product, performance, or event," which she emphasizes "considers process as much as product, examining the shared social and rhetorical practices that produce such discursive outcomes as books and articles, speeches and sermons, petition drives and conventions" (p. 134).
As a collaborative feminist webtext, the labor we each contributed and the "social circulation" of our recovered texts and research processes were key ideas we sought to engage and represent (Kirsch and Royster, 2010).
In addition to collaboration and formal contribution, a key consideration of the role of “people” in a Scalar project is the ability to reveal contributors and users as real (embodied, positioned) people. We responded especially to Patricia Fancher's (2017) “Technofeminist Design,” which explores the visual and affective connections between our embodied selves as authors, to which we responded by making our physical images and reflections a major component of our recovery work. Throughout the project, we sought similar ways to make visible our own intellectual and embodied contributions to this work, in order to implicate ourselves in a feminist network that we were simultaneously documenting and participating in.
Scalar made this work possible by providing various visualization tools that allowed us to emplace ourselves alongside our authors in spatio-temporal feminist contexts. For example, having entered geospatial metadata for our individual reflections, Scalar allowed us to generate and embed a map visualizing our connections to one another, below. The attention to embodiment and positionality “giv[es] voice to participants and validates their experiences” (Almjeld et al., 2016) In the context of feminist recovery, those participants include archival subjects as well as contemporary researchers, readers, and other interested parties. The specific commitment to giving voice to and validating archival subjects is already well established among feminist archival researchers (Heidi McKee and James Porter 2012). Encouraging users to locate content and contributions on a map insists on a sense of positionality that “honor[s] the personal and political" (Almjeld et al., 2016). By placing themselves on the map, student-authors then applied this understanding to themselves as well, seeing the distance and proximity between and among themselves–a particular challenge in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that was underway during student-authors composing. This global sense of socio-historical positionality is an important feminist value (Wang, 2012; Wu, 2005; Kirsch and Royster, 2010).)
Another aspect of collaboration and contribution that marks Scalar as notably feminist is its approachability for technologists of varying levels of experience. While some experience with digital media and basic coding knowledge is certainly helpful to any new technology adoption, deep technical expertise should not be necessary for using Scalar, making it ideal for adoption by feminist rhetoricians who might not (yet) consider themselves multimodal scholars. We consider this to be an empowering aspect of the platform, inviting a range of feminist scholars into such multimodal work. Student-authors were empowered to contribute to the work of technofeminist recovery regardless of their previous experience or expertise with technology.
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2021-11-17T03:36:53-08:00
In Our Experience
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Our experience with Scalar in our project
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2022-02-07T11:51:20-08:00
As we continued to read more scholarship and anthologies, and to work with the digital platform to accomplish our own recovery efforts, we came to realize that recovery is complicated. But we came to appreciate that as a strength. As one student-author put it, feminist recovery does “not need to be ‘clean’ or fit within a certain mold” (Samantha Rusnak) — an insight which led us nicely into our work with Scalar and its various functionalities.
We began to our own efforts at digital feminist recovery in Scalar about halfway through the quarter. Scalar provided us with digital space to map out our media and analysis and reflect on the rhetoricity of the digital project we were composing. As the digital work got underway, we also read more scholarship to help us to reflect on our digital design practice, such as the influential article from Patricia Fancher from which student-authors ended up deriving their anthology’s subtitle. Fancher helped students to consider the array of design possibilities available to them and to meditate in particular on the role of their own embodied experiences, considering how materiality and affect could be rendered visible within their text.Design Choices
It was not until late in our process that we considered the possible value of having more of a centralized and holistic vision for our project, with more of a house-style driving our design choices. We assigned two student-editors (both of whom are now authors of the current article) to oversee the book at this holistic level, who noticed important revisions that should be made for consistency or usability, and who also helped to generate the content of the book that transcended any given section. Specifically, those editors oversaw the generation of the map page (right),including ensuring appropriate tagging of subpages to render the map correctly, and oversaw the tagging system that was to interconnect the various contributions thematically. It would have been beneficial to have some of these high-level concern and decisions established earlier one, but it was also sufficient to address them in a later-stage editorial review. As it is, the project features quite varied style and navigation choices that might be disruptive or confusing to the reader. We decided to keep it that way, though, to emphasize the different voices and perspectives that were shaping this work and to let them remain visible and, we think, charmingly chaotic.At the same time, we did make some project-level decisions to provide consistency. For example, we asked all groups to create a splash page to introduce their selection, with standardized naming conventions for those pages, so that a reader had that visual marker to indicate the transition between project sections. This also allowed for a more uniform visualization of the book’s contents when viewed as a whole.