Problem and goals:

In view of the devastating effects of mass incarceration in the United States and in an effort to address the needs of incarcerated people as they rebuild their lives, I propose to design and develop a proof of concept for an undergraduate college-level course in digital skills and digital humanities to be taught in prison. The goals of this course are to help students learn technical skills that will be useful for reentry and to develop critical skills that will be useful for intellectual pursuits. Education is a right, the exercise of which is at present denied to over two million people in prison and jail. Only 35% of prisons in the United States offer college courses at the present time.[1] Amongst these, there are very few digital humanities courses. This is partly due to a scarcity of hard and soft infrastructure to support digital work and largely because incarcerated people are generally forbidden access to the internet.

Contribution to the digital humanities:

This gap, or digital divide, presents us with an opportunity to build a much-needed course that does not exist at the present time and to innovate by developing minimal computing software that will allow us to teach specific digital skills without an internet connection. Furthermore, by developing minimal computing software, we will create course materials easily exportable to low-tech environments around the world.

Tentative final product:

We will produce minimal computing software, documentation, a course curriculum, a syllabus, lesson plans, datasets for lessons, open source documentation and a project website. I suspect it will be best to develop only one or two parts of the course (for example, introductory lessons and a unit on data visualization, text mining or coding), as proof of concept.

Long term goals:

We have been invited by Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn (MDC Brooklyn) to teach a pilot course there in fall 2019. The director of the John Jay Reentry Institute Prison to College Pipeline (P2CP) program is interested in incorporating our project as an experimental credit-bearing course to be taught at Otisville Correctional Facility in spring 2020.

Possible roles:

• Project manager
• Software developer (I think we will need two software developers)
• Curriculum developer
• Research
• Outreach, Design/UX

Here is the full revised proposal: Pringle_Sabina_DH_in_Prison_2019

[1] Bender, Kathleen. “Education Opportunities in Prison Are Key to Reducing Crime.” Center for American Progress, March 2, 2018.

Project:  To develop a prototype for an online tutorial to Teach Basic Concepts in Spatial Thinking and GIS Mapping to Digital Humanities Students

There’s been a growing interest among humanities scholars in exploring the capabilities of Global Information Systems (GIS) and applying these tools in their pedagogy and research.  These tools provide a new lens for scholars to ask different questions and explore the relationship of place and space in innovative ways.  While this ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities is exciting, the adoption of these methodologies has been slow due to the lack of exposure to spatial thinking and geographic concepts, and the steep learning curve for using these tools.

This project will develop a prototype for an online tutorial with the objective of introducing students in the humanities to spatial thinking and geo-spatial concepts and methodologies.  It will outline the schematics, terms and analytic tools that are common across GIS software platforms.  We believe this will encourage the exploration and application of these tools in humanities research.

The project will employ innovations in interactive digital pedagogy and utilize open-access platforms.  The intent is to supplement traditional undergraduate and graduate courses by providing students access to foundational concepts not normally taught in the humanities.

The project team will develop a prototype for a series of open source, online tutorials intended to achieve the following learning outcomes:

• to introduce students in the humanities to spatial thinking
• to develop a basic understanding of geo-spatial concepts and methodologies
• to provide a schematic that describes how GIS tools are organized, introducing the most common terms and analytical tools.

For more detail, see the attached proposal…….DH Praxis Proposal

Sandy and I had originally proposed an aggregation and curation news site for stories produced by nonprofit media outlets. We decided to pitch another project, one that’s still journalism-oriented but focused on the digital archiving of historical immigrant newspapers in NYC. Here’s a partial version of our proposal, with a link to the more complete write-up at the end.

In the city, hundreds of media outlets make up the community and ethnic media sector, which targets select populations whether that be residents of a specific neighborhood or borough, or a particular ethnic group. These kind of specialized newspapers, especially ones that cater to specific ethnicities, have been a part of New York for much of its history. We want to gather, in one location, a record of some of these often overlooked publications. The digital archive, housed on a website, would include immigrant newspapers, founded within a specific time period, in the form of images and information.

For now, we envision the newspaper archive as including the following for each individual publication, depending on what can be found:

• Image of the front page of a select issue and/or full issues (and if the newspaper still exists, images from present day)
• Profile information: community served, language, years active, geographic reach, readership, location, facts, description, etc.
• Links to libraries, museums and other sources to view issues of the newspaper

In addition to the archive, we also want to include a series of visualizations on the website:

• Map of newspaper locations that can be adjusted based on language and country of origin
• Animated map showing the emergence and disappearance of newspapers through the years
• Timeline and other visualizations that reflect the waves of immigration in relation to the number of newspapers

Here is the full proposal: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18T7q_2eDhrIdC3YHRi9ejBFc8eO2hxnDaiN1XdHzAvA/edit?usp=sharing

MADH/MALS 75500 – praxis pitch summary

Nancy Foasberg, Hannah House, Rob Garfield

We’re presenting our summary as an FAQ for maximum clarity. Attached at the bottom are the key elements from our full project proposal.

What is Digital Humanities Data?

With the explosion of Intro to Digital Humanities (DH) courses, increasing numbers of humanities students are working with datasets. Digital humanities data is most commonly text, but can also be numbers, images, film, sound files, or can come in other forms. Datasets, however, are not sufficiently self-explanatory. As Gehru et al. propose in Datasheets for Datasets, data is best delivered alongside an explanation of its creation, as these circumstances shape the way it can be worked with and what conclusions which can be drawn. Our project seeks to present DH datasets in a more transparent, thoughtful way, highlighting both the decisions made during the process and the methods by which practitioners make sense of them.

What questions are we answering? What problems are we solving?

• How can we better present digital humanities datasets to communicate the choices made during data creation and manipulation and shine a light on how they shape analysis and the conclusions that are drawn?
• DH curricula vary widely; methods of teaching data are still far from standardized. This project aims to develop a method of data presentation in the hopes of moving toward a more broadly applicable standard.
• What data resources would be useful in digital humanities courses? This project will establish an open educational resource that may fulfill some of these needs.

What is the contribution to the field?

• Supports DH pedagogy, particularly the growing number of Intro to DH courses, by providing professors and students with a collection of humanities datasets containing step-by-step examples of the data preparation and analysis process. This approach will demonstrate a humanistic approach to interrogating digital data.
• Provide an open educational resource that allows DH instructors to focus on specific parts of the quantitative research process.
• Model the presentation of research data alongside information about the creation and transformation of the data, in order to better contextualize research findings and other conclusions drawn from that data. The intent is to establish a convention that contextualizing information is always communicated alongside the datasets themselves.

What is the output?

• The target output for this semester, our minimum viable product, is a website featuring at least 3 datasets, each on its own page and accompanied by information on its origin, transformations, and discussion of how decisions made during this process shape the conclusions that can be drawn from the data. A major consideration in the selection of datasets will be variety — that is, ideally, each dataset will represent a different type of data. The website will also include an About This Project page which will explain our project history and goals, thoughts on next steps, and provide contact information and/or a form for site users to give feedback. This website will be available for community review and potential in-class use for the Fall 2019 semester.
• We have carefully tailored this proposal to ensure that a team of 4-5 people can feasibly complete work on the product by the end of spring break. A week-by-week work plan listing major activities and milestones is in development. We have procured faculty and technical advisement. Hosting will be on the CUNY Commons or other CUNY space. No extra budget is required.

Who is the audience / user?

We have three intended audiences:

1. Instructors teaching Intro to Digital Humanities courses may use this tool in a course module on humanistic interrogation of data. We have tentative buy-in on some Fall 2019 use at the GC;
2. Students of digital humanities may use this as a reference for examples of how data result from a series of choices that influence the conclusions they may draw when using processed data for analysis. This will help students draw more robust and meaningful conclusions; and
3. Digital humanities practitioners, who we hope will find this method of presenting data broadly useful as a convention for the field. We will seek feedback from DH practitioners about whether our model is successful in this respect.

What are the sources? Will we need permissions?

• As part of the research component of this project, we will identify 3 datasets that are openly licensed, are in the public domain, or for which we can easily obtain permission. One potential source we may use is a TEI-tagged Open Editions text, with project owner Jonathan Reeve’s permission.  We will also consult with Professor Matthew Gold and other faculty to help identify datasets.

Who is already involved?

• Project staff
  • Nancy Foasberg: design, development, OER perspective
  • Rob Garfield: design, development, pedagogy perspective
  • Hannah House: project management/development, design, data critique perspective
• Project advisors
  • Matthew K. Gold: Faculty perspective advisement
  • Jonathan Reeve (PhD candidate at Columbia): Technical advisement

Who might like to join our project?

• We are all highly motivated and have a supportive, collaborative, friendly group dynamic. We are looking for positive and enthusiastic teammates to keep the good times rolling. Our primary need is for someone skilled at outreach. We also welcome participation from anyone excited about data, especially if you have a dataset in mind you think we should include, or if you are knowledgeable about pedagogy and methodologies for working with data. Of course, those who have  expertise in UX also have a lot to contribute! Let’s make something together!

Open the full(er) proposal (note that you will need to be logged into the Commons to open it): Project Trike proposal

At this point, Anthony and I have been equally dividing the labor of this project, and envision a continuation of this within the expected roles. We have conducted outreach via the CUNY Community Colleges, and have acquired a list of supportive faculty who have offered their guidance along the way. Increased outreach might ideally manifest through classroom exposure of our game project, which aside from conferences and graduate level courses, have not been able to get more feedback from undergraduate students. The development of the game project has also been created in equal collaboration, and will continue to do so. It would be wonderful to have additional scaffolding or collaborative assistance in enhancing features of our game such images, and possibly sound effects which neither of us are proficient enough as of yet in CS skills. Design also falls within these parameters of development goals. Furthermore, given the scope of our project an additional 1-2 team members, particularly in the development sector might produce a productive expansion of our project without the original aim/mission becoming lost.  

Finally since the original submission of this project, we have continued to modify/expand the game under the guidance of Dr. Carlos Hernandez and had the chance to recently present our research at the CUNY Games Conference!

The details of our project proposal are attached below: 

MALS-75500-Project-Proposal (1)