My final project feels much more straightforward than some of the awesome projects previously posted. As mentioned, I’m in my 3rd year of the Urban Education doctoral program and am in my final semester of coursework (if all goes according to plan), so I am in second exam/dissertation proposal mode. My reason for enrolling in the course was to collect more resources for understanding the political ramifications of digital humanities scholarship, and in thinking about the final project, I’d like to use it as a space to begin writing my literature review (or perhaps another section) of my second exam. It does not sound as cool as others’ ideas, but I need to be resourceful with my time, and I think my context is pretty cool.

I am a Professional Learning Research and Development Assistant with the Computing-Integrated Teacher Education (CITE) initiative at CUNY Central (in collaboration with Michigan State University). We work with 15 CUNY campus’s teacher education programs as their faculty integrate computational thinking/digital literacy education across their teacher-ed programs/courses. For my dissertation, I’m interested in investigating how integrating digital approaches in humanities teacher ed spaces transform future teachers’ dispositions towards technology using the framework my team developed, teaching about, with, through, and against technology. Subquestions include how it impacts equity in learning and computing more broadly and how it can be designed to be culturally sustaining as well. However, given DH is a relatively fresh field of study, our researchers have not been naming the awesome artifacts being developed by humanities ed faculty as Digital Humanities work. As a result, in order to frame my question and the context, I need to begin by exploring the precarious relationship between DH and K-12 computing, how computing has been rolled out into schools, the vague definition of digital humanities, and the way it presents itself in these spaces.

That was a lot, but that’s the gist.

TL;DR: I’m hoping that using the final project as a research paper/literature review can help me to write out and organize my thoughts for my second exam.

by Sean

I’m considering writing up a course proposal for a teaching practicum course for grad students in the Humanities and, maybe, the Social Sciences. My expertise doesn’t really extend much beyond those fields, so whatever I would have to say in other fields probably wouldn’t make much sense. 

Rationale

From what I’ve seen, most of the pedagogy courses here are theory-based, which is understandable, but I think the utility is limited. I’ve started four pedagogy classes here (and finished only one), and what I’ve noticed is that the structure seems to be discussing theory for twelve weeks then spending the last three weeks coming up with some sort of project that can be used in a classroom. 

My issue with this is that assembling one project does not prepare someone for the classroom. If a prospective educator can’t write a decent syllabus or organize a class or develop a grading rubric, the project they’ve developed isn’t going to help much. 

Organization

I would structure the class with the following topics:

1. Writing a syllabus
2. Choosing appropriate texts for the class
3. Setting up assignments
4. Setting up grading rubrics
5. Office hours and helping students
6. Interacting with institutional policies
7. Tech resources available. 

Issues

The biggest issue would be finding courses for the students to teach as a practicum. When I took a practicum class at the University of Illinois, everyone in the class taught a free course for the spouses of international graduate students. 

This worked there because many international students lived on or close to campus and, especially the incoming graduate students, their spouses still couldn’t work yet, or could only work on campus, so they had the time. 

I’m nor sure that there is an equivalent population at the Grad Center, and even if there was, that practicum worked for those of us entering the field of Teaching ESL. A practicum for those in the Humanities in general would be difficult to manage. 

I know that, at one point years ago, the GC had funding to do this sort of thing where grad students got classes on various campuses, but planning a course on the possibility of a teaching slot is an issue. 

One possible way to handle it is to set up the opening assignment as “You’re teaching a course in your field at a community college”, which means an intro level or second year course, and go from there. 

Precarity and ChatGPT

While AI algorithms can automate many tasks, people are still necessary to oversee and improve these systems.

I would like to touch upon how much human labor is involved with the creation of AI/ML (Machine Learning.) The focus would be with Precarity with any structures surrounding the creations of AI/ML. With some sub topics on Power structures(FAANG companies) it can bring. Plus if there are any creation or implementation of Care (Ethics in AI.)

I understand Precarity as: Precarity refers to a state of being insecure, uncertain, or at risk of harm or disadvantage 

I currently believe that AI/ML is in an infant stage of its development and extremely insecure and can be at a risk of further disrupting and influencing humanity/society to a unknown area due to our capitalistic nature.

Examples of human labor in AI/ML are:

Data Collection and Labeling: AI systems rely on large amounts of data to learn and make predictions.

Who are the people that review this? what are their roles? Do they have proper precaution when working?

Since this is the initial stage of the process, i believe this is important to visualize.

Algorithm Development/Model Training and Validation: AI algorithms are typically created by human developers who write code.
System implementation and Deployment: Human engineers and technicians responsible for implementing and deploying AI systems in real-world settings.
Monitoring and Maintenance: After the AI system is deployed, people are responsible for monitoring its performance and making adjustments.

Who are these developers? How much bias would we get? do we have any demographic on their background? once an AI system is in place, is there an ethics personnel?

These are questions that i will start with

I would like to discuss this in an essay format and in addition, i would like to present the demographics in a Tableau presentation.

Brie Scolaro, LMSW

I posted about my final project last week, so this week I use my post to speak in response to the podcast, Hear to Slay: We Don’t Have The Same Job (with Patricia Matthew, and Dr. Nina Banks),” and will use my comments to support the projects of my peers.

But first…centering the voices of these amazing Black Womxn…

“Having a PhD doesnt mean you have a job. And having a job doesnt mean you keep that job”…regarding the fact that when someone like Cornell West doesnt even know where he is gonna go to seek security. Dr. West was offered the beefiest package except for tenure (in reference to blocks to tenure at Harvard).

Academia is vastly different for Black and Brown scholars than it is for White individuals. The major structural inequality highlighted by Roxanne Gay is that of achieving tenure in academia. Tenure means security. Tenure means we want you, we invest in you, long term, and no matter what you do, stand for, or say, we back you.

Tricia Matthew and Dr. Nina Banks, Roxanne’s guest speakers, highlight two messages that have stuck with me in particular and that I think are worth all of us knowing about and/or discussing.

The message is that White academics, “want you to do or be what affirms the path they took to get here. When you do not affirm this, you threaten this.”

This speaks not to the institutional structure of the university, but the culture of White supremacy within.

The notion to affirm the path of White individuals directly relates to second message around the concept of “pet or threat.”

White folx demand BIPOC to be their pet in the work, almost like an object to possess or to make them feel good, but while also always holding the power and a (false) feeling of inherent superiority. And if not pet, then threat.

The positions of Black and Brown folx within academia is a precarious one for these reasons and more. Even when holding the experience, the expertise, the Black womxn in this podcast, Roxanne and Tricia, share how they are constantly have thwt expertise devalued, are offered “mentorship” by White folx without being asked, are expected to speak on behalf of all Black folx, are hired for administrations to fill a checkmark as opposed to finding true worth in ones academic/research knowledge. 

Kudos to Katina for assigning podcasts like these in this DH class. I can imagine it is uncommon in the DH space, and I think it is awesome to be challenging business as usual and doing that work. Love the dialogue in and around this class and look forward to actually continuing to hold space with yall.

by db

i find myself vacillating between two possible options to explore for the final project for our course. overall, i’m really interested in helping educators cultivate inclusive, anti-racist/anti-oppressive classroom spaces. personally, i have found abolitionist praxis most useful in facilitating humanizing, student-centered learning. my ambitious project is to create a online, public-facing syllabus (one that is unrestrained by the academy) that explores abolition. i recognize that “abolition” can be a controversial/polarizing issue, and feel it is important to create space to explore these challenging topics. i was recently especially moved by the work of Kyncard, and her online syllabus on black feminist pedagogies: http://www.blackfeministpedagogies.com. i want to more deeply engage with what learning looks like when there isn’t gate-keeping, when more of us have access. i’m not sure yet what platform would be most suitable for this particular project, although as a long time Roxane Gay fan (and recent Patty Krawec fan), i’m drawn to their use of substack.

the other project i am exploring for ITP would investigate resources for educators to integrate AI into their existing curriculum. my research questions: can AI help to eliminate the need to cheat? how could intentional integration of these technologies encourage development of authentic voice in middle school students? what current conditions encourage cheating/plagiary in middle school students?

that’s all i have for now…still ideating.

Tuka Al-Sahlani

I am working on a digital project for my ITP course that centers care and compassion as a pedagogical framework for a writing classroom. I am exploring the format of the digital garden (both metaphorically and technically). Presently, the working name of my project is Writing Pedagogy from Compassion: A Community Digital Garden.

 A digital garden simply stated is a blog that encourages knowledge creation and writing as a process by setting the premise that the posts are incomplete and/ or developing. This notion, for me, allows teachers, especially writing pedagogues, a space to think and write about compassionate strategies and practices in their writing classrooms while embodying the vulnerability of writing their students and most ( if not all) writers experience in the act of writing. 

Metaphorically, the garden as a place of nurture, growth, and community is appealing to me. In that sense, my grand idea (hence TLDR) is to have a community digital garden. As of now I have a sketch of a website with three main sections: rows (the digital garden where “gardeners” post ideations/projects/questions), commune ( the forum for members to ask and respond to each other), and the harvest (resources for teaching writing from compassion). 

This is the landing page of the sketch. I learned about better ways to design my page last week at a GC Digital Fellows workshop that I will implement. 

In my meeting with Nelson, he suggested using Miro, a collaborative platform for the Rows aspect of my website. I explored some of the templates on Miro for education and reflection and found them helpful, but I have yet to figure out if or how to embed Miro into my website, but I also believe I can replicate one or two of the reflection templates in the Rows section. ( Thank you Nelson!)

My concerns now are, what section should I tackle first? I think the resource section might be the easiest (if such a thing exists) since I will be curating resources and not creating them. This will allow me to think of the digital garden aspect and how to curate the seasonal gardeners ( writing pedagogues) who will think and write in the space. I am not too sure I want to include the commune section. I would like some feedback or questions to help me through the choice to keep or eliminate or revise the commune ( forum) section. 

Yes, this is a large project, but presently I want to work on the minimum viable product. 

If you would like to learn more about a digital garden, here are a few resources:

The Garden and the Stream: https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/

Maggie Appleton’s garden https://maggieappleton.com/garden 

Amanda Pinkser’s reading list https://amandapinsker.com/reading 

Tom Critchlow’s personal digital garden https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/ 

Sindhu Shivaprasad’s garden https://www.sindhu.live/gardenDigital Garden Terms of Service: https://www.swyx.io/digital-garden-tos#why-we-need-a-terms-of-service

Adrianna

I got my final project idea from the Data Feminism piece. Data Feminism presents Maria Salguero’s use of counterdata to map the locations of femicides in Mexico. As we’ve read, her work has been a crucial tool and it has provided visibility for the victims. Contrary to Mexico, in Puerto Rico we have the Observatorio de Equidad de Género (OEG). This is an entity that traces these cases and has documented the data on a list. The OEG has shared its data so that it can be part of a Latin-American femicide map. However, that map is yet to be created. In the meantime, I would like to create a map that focuses on Puerto Rican femicides, mimicking Salguero’s model. It will be the first one of its kind and it will also be bilingual (I doubt that the Latin-American map will be in English). I will use Google Maps, just as Salguero did and my main source will be the list from the OEG. The OEG has missing information such as names, specific locations, time of crime etc. As a goal, I’d like to try and fill in these gaps by looking into local media and news. I will work my way backwards from 2023 and hope to map femicides up until April 2021.

I’m going to supplement the map with a rationale where I’ll write about my motives, inspiration, expected audience, experience etc. Some of my goals are to find patterns within seasons, locations and age groups. Some things that I will do that differ from Salguero and the OEG are: 1- I’ve chosen to refrain from the term victim and refer to these women by their first names. 2- I will set their first names as labels to each pin, to make them even more alive/visible when people see the map at first glance. 3-I’m going to do research so that I can place the pin in the exact location of their femicide (not just the town).

I know this will be an emotional experience for me which is why I’ve started a Word document that will become my journal. I plan to do short free writing exercises chronicling my thoughts each day that I spend working on the map. I don’t think I’ll be sharing the journal (unless anyone wants to read it) because it will not be polished writing. I’m eager to explore this type of data activism and hopeful that it might generate urgent conversations around gender-based violence. Any type of ideas, suggestions, constructive criticism is always welcomed and much appreciated!

*Other comments: I will be using the term feminicide instead of femicide. Here’s a link to my map in case you want to follow along (I’ve only added 4 pins). Please excuse the missing accents in Spanish, it’s just a draft. This is all for now, more details soon.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1HvP9jp3ku0LQyq51qkYP-PE8Qr9FV5E&ll=18.762001981849128%2C-66.38479892304687&z=9

by Jen

My final project asks: is the work of indexing and coding a text for analysis a reductive act, or can it be an act of care?

I bring to this work a perspective of the type of indexing that is typically done in libraries. This tends to focus on what a text is about; sometimes it will focus on who a text is by. Both of these feel reductive to me because determining “aboutness” is always a struggle and always requires focusing on some aspects more than others; I believe that some types of “aboutness” are always overlooked. A focus on authorship of a text is problematic because it complies with capitalist notions of authorship that celebrate specific types of contributions and that codify authorship in order to preserve economic benefit.

I have been working with a large number of newspapers from the radical Left in the 1960s and 1970s for my research. One of these, RAT Subterranean News, is notable because it changed halfway through its (3 year) lifespan after being taken over by a group of women. I have been curious about the different ways we can describe the impact these women had on the paper, but also, felt that a lens of subject analysis of the paper was not entirely helpful; when I took a quick pass at that work, I felt like I was boiling down the women’s contribution to “more articles about women,” but wondered how I could show that they are doing more than just elevating a content subject area that wasn’t there before.

I was deeply compelled by the recently released Letterpress Revolution, which explores the work being done specifically by anarchist newspapers. The author Kathy Ferguson created a set of types of work being done by different pieces of content in an anarchist newspaper: sharing news, creating public space, encouraging debate, etc. Her framework feels very applicable to me on a broader scale, outside anarchist publications.

Using that framework, I have started analyzing approximately 70 issues of RAT, from the first until (I think) the last. I am indexing each piece of content in the newspaper using Kathy Ferguson’s framework. My goal is to finish organize that analysis and then find a meaningful way to present that data that reveals some of the nuance that I think is missing in a subject-level analysis, and to depict what was being done by the women who took over RAT. How did their takeover of the newspaper transform that work that this publication was doing? Can we perhaps see that they imagined and realized greater possibilities for newspapers on the radical left? And ultimately, can this kind of analysis feel like it’s showing nuance and illuminating overlooked work, rather than feeling reductive?

The shape of my final project still feels a little murky. I’m not a whiz at data visualization, but will work on finding a way to share my findings visually. I imagine this would also be accompanied by a narrative providing context for my work and for the work of indexing this type of publication, as well as a textual interpretation of my results.

by diana

I was really intrigued by the parallels that Bethany Nowviskie drew between land stewardship and digital stewardship. As I learn more from Indigenous scholars like Kimmerer about our responsibilities to one another, I find myself reckoning with the interconnectedness of everything. I took this question from Nowviskie’s piece and decided to pose it to ChatGPT.

Prompt: Please respond to this question: What kinds of indigenous knowledge do we neglect to represent—or fail to understand—in our digital libraries?

Response:

As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions or feelings. However, I can provide information that might be helpful to answer your question.

Indigenous knowledge systems include diverse and complex ways of understanding the world and managing natural resources, passed down through generations of indigenous communities. These knowledge systems are often closely tied to cultural and spiritual practices, and they have been developed and refined over thousands of years to ensure the survival and well-being of indigenous peoples.

Digital libraries have the potential to provide access to a vast array of information, including indigenous knowledge, to a wider audience. However, there are several challenges in representing and understanding indigenous knowledge in digital libraries. Some of the neglected areas include:

1. Oral traditions: Many indigenous cultures have rich oral traditions that convey important knowledge and history. However, these traditions may not be represented in digital libraries, as they are not written down.
2. Cultural context: Indigenous knowledge is often embedded within cultural practices and traditions that may be difficult for outsiders to understand. Digital libraries may not provide enough context to understand the meaning and significance of this knowledge.
3. Intellectual property rights: Indigenous knowledge is often held collectively by a community, rather than by individuals. Digital libraries may not respect indigenous peoples’ intellectual property rights, leading to exploitation and appropriation of their knowledge.
4. Language barriers: Many indigenous languages are endangered, and there is a risk that indigenous knowledge may be lost if it is not documented in these languages. Digital libraries may not have enough resources to support the preservation and representation of indigenous languages.
5. Western bias: Digital libraries are often developed from a Western perspective, and may not incorporate indigenous ways of organizing and representing knowledge.

Overall, to ensure that indigenous knowledge is represented and understood in digital libraries, it is crucial to involve indigenous communities in the development and curation of these resources. This can help to ensure that indigenous knowledge is represented accurately and with appropriate cultural context, and that the intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples are respected.

Reflections: I was struck first by how quickly so much information was generated. I also kept expecting the response to end…but it kept going! This response feels so thoughtful, which got me thinking about the care that Nowviskie included in her original question to begin with. I see so much potential in the possibilities of learning with AI, and believe that interactions with it are a sandbox for us to learn and metabolize a great deal of abstract or concrete information quickly, and also an opportunity for the AI itself to learn about the questions that are important to us. I am curious about the ethics behind using AI tools; this information came from somewhere. Who gets credited? Are certain kinds of knowledges privileged? How are they protected? As a middle school educator, I wonder about how we might teach students to use tools like this responsibly.

Tuka Al-Sahlani

Madoré et al, “Resisting Surveillance” (JITP)

“The growing critical literature on grading tells us that grades reflect graders’ biases, too often replicating normative definitions of “good” writing, participation, or comportment contingent on white, cis, straight, middle/upper class, non-disabled, English monolingual ideals (Kynard 2008).”

This made me pause and reflect. I know grading is subjective, especially in writing courses, especially in writing courses with mostly multilingual and diverse students, but what I have seemed to miss is that I was/am participating in exclusionary practices. I have read about upgrading and contractual grading ( which this piece critiques) from a pedagogical perspective of serving the whole student and creating space for differentiation and universal design. However,  I have not encountered the perspective of grading as a means of policing and surveillance– at least nothing that has made me pause in awe. I have been thinking about revising my grading system in my undergraduate class, but have been delaying implementing it because of the labor required to make such changes. After reading this article,  I cannot delay the changes. There is a sense of urgency that I felt from this article, and justifiably so, seeing that austerity is becoming the means of managing CUNY currently. Thinking of precarity though, I know that teaching small or in this case upgrading small will be a better way to sustain change in the long run. Now, I am thinking: What small grading changes can I make in the remainder of the semester to avoid some policing in my course?