Week 13
Contrasting Project Curation
In this week's assignment, we were asked to find 3 DH project sites that curate their projects in contrasting ways. These are mine:
Stanford's Chinese Canadian Immigrant Flows, 1912-23
American Prison Writing Archive at Hamilton College
A People's Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland
These three projects show different ways of showing data. The Stanford one uses a program from the Spacial History Lab and Adobe Flash to let users see where Chinese immigrants lived in Canadian cities over the course of 11 years. The user can scroll left to right and watch how Chinese people from different districts settled in different areas over time. It's really interesting to look at, but is intimidating for those who aren't used to the system. As well, with Adobe basically dying at the end of 2020 (with whatever hope had left as humans), I wonder what will happen to this project and how it will (or won't) adapt.
The second project is a listing of 2776 essays written by American prison inmates about their lives since incarceration. The listing can be searched through a search function, as well as a browse function that can pull up essays from a specific state, prison, author, and even author attributes (such as ethnicity, gender identity, religion, etc.). There aren't any data visualizations like in the Stanford project, but I don't think they need it to be successful. The point of the essays is to remind people that incarcerated people are people, not numbers, not crime statistics, etc. If the researchers had created a data visualization about the number of black inmates or trans inmates or essays talking about police brutality, etc., those visualizations would further reduce inmates to a single part of themselves. It would take away from the voices of the inmates themselves. This taught me that there are places where the visual representation is not only unnecessary, but also inappropriate.
The third site posts images and stories of black people who have been abused or even killed by police. These stories are posted by people who have been affected by these events. Some of the stories are written essays, and others are videos, audio clips, and other forms of media. A striking aspect of this project is the faces that stare at the reader of people who have been killed by Cleveland police. In a similar vein as the second project, this project humanizes the victims through stories (though this time written by those who loved the victim), but also does so through images. Because the content is user generated, there is little data visualization here.