Miriam Posner's Blog – Digital humanities, data, labor, and information (original) (raw)

For managing course materials, UCLA uses a Canvas-based application branded as BruinLearn. I don’t love it! Everything takes too many clicks to accomplish, it’s ugly, and I hate its built-in student-surveillance features. I tend to create a WordPress site for each class I teach, using BruinLearn mainly for submitting assignments and hosting material that’s not freely available on the web. Technically, I think I could accomplish with BruinLearn most of what I do on WordPress, but it would be an enormous, unwieldy pain.

However! Every once in awhile I get wind of a BruinLearn feature that actually sounds useful, so a few months ago I combed through the list of tools to see what I might use. I don’t like a lot of the BruinLearn apps. A lot of the tools emphasize surveillance or plagiarism-detection and other…cop shit, which is not how I like to teach. There’s also a rising number of AI tools (who asked for these?) and a lot of proprietary textbook material. But here are a few BL tools I’ve incorporated into my teaching relatively recently.

Continue reading “Lesser-known BruinLearn tools you might actually use”

The title says it all: a couple of weeks ago, I received notification that my tenure and promotion to associate professor is officially approved. I am immensely relieved. I’m fortunate that the whole process was fairly smooth for me, but you just never know, and part of me couldn’t believe that this would ever happen for me.

To be honest, I didn’t really see tenure as a realistic possibility for myself for the first five or six years of my career. Partly it was because I was working an “alt-ac” job for that period, and partly it just seemed as though these opportunities were vanishingly few, and I couldn’t see why I should be an exception.

Continue reading “Tenure”

We’re staring down the barrel of an extremely bleak future, and yet I’m still teaching every week and doing the best I can. It’s sometimes hard to focus on my classes, but sometimes it’s a relief; I do believe that what we do matters and I would like to keep doing it for as long as I can maintain the integrity of my teaching.

Today I’m distracting myself by writing about teaching tools. Lord knows I love a toy. I’m always interested in what people are using, even though I’ve been burned countless times by disappearing tech. (RIP Mozilla Popcorn Maker, Clarity, ManyEyes, etc., etc.) Many people hate how often tools come and go, and I really don’t blame them. But I seem to have a strong novelty-seeking streak and I’m always curious about what’s new.

It probably goes without saying that you can be, and many people are, a top-notch teacher without using any technology beyond paper and pencil. You can also be an abysmal teacher while also being really good at tech. I just happen to like getting ideas for new ways to interact with students via technology, and it’s a good way to get students’ attention (at least temporarily).

I’ll start with tools you can use in any class, and then maybe I’ll follow this up with tools I use in DH classes specifically.

Continue reading “Teaching tools I use right now”

In the spirit of letting no writing go to waste: my friends at Arizona State University asked me to lead a “design studio” on the future of work and caregiving. They asked me to write three introductions, one for each of three “movements,” during which the studio participants were invited to discuss questions about caregiving and labor. I included an image or a quote for each movement, which I’ve added to the post.

Thank you to the very professional and creative ASU staff—I don’t think I’ve ever participated in such a well-managed event. We even had a dress rehearsal!

I’m still very angry!! I will probably never stop being angry!!

Continue reading “Care, capital, and COVID”

Here I am, still blogging like some kind of caveman. I guess I should be using Substack or Medium or something, but maybe blogs will come back in style, like other artifacts of the ’00s.

Anyway, in the past, when people asked me whether I could teach my digital humanities classes online, I hemmed and hawed. Tools like web-based visualization software have made it easier to share work across platforms, and heaven knows there are plenty of cloud-based collaboration tools out there.

The thing that worried me was teaching new tech skills, which is a big part of my classes, and particularly my Intro to DH classes. I am super, super picky about how to do this, as I’ve mentioned before. My feeling is, I get one shot to teach the students this new skill, and if something goes badly wrong, I’ve not only missed my shot, but I may inadvertently lead someone to believe they’re not capable of learning the skill. It’s why I teach every single skill myself, rather than invite people to give workshops; I just know exactly how I want it done.

Continue reading “Teaching technical skills online”

Have I ever felt this angry or trapped in my entire life? Certainly—let me cut you off right there at the pass—the world has seen greater cruelties and outrages. “Broken childcare infrastructure” barely makes the list of world-historical tragedies.

And yet for sheer absurdity, for the unbelievable stupidness of this problem, for our steadfast refusal to acknowledge the giant fucking impossible disaster hanging over all of our heads—for that, this year should win some kind of award.

Let me back up. California’s public schools are all currently online, as they should be. I have a seven-year-old daughter who’s in Zoom school. I also have a six-month-old baby. I also have a full-time job, as does my husband.

Continue reading “Sitting with the rage”

I’ve published several things in the last few months, and thanks to UC’s institutional repository, I’ve been able to make them available to everyone.

“See No Evil”

Logic Magazine no. 4 (buy a copy of this great magazine!)

This is a piece for general readership that investigates the software behind today’s massive, sprawling supply chains. I’m finishing the academic version and hope to have it out soonish.

“Prostitutes, Charity Girls, and The End of the Road: Hostile Worlds of Sex and Commerce in an Early Sexual Hygiene Film”

In Health Education Films in the Twentieth Century. Editors: Bonah C, Cantor D, Laukötter A. 173-187. University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY 2018.

This piece looks at an American sexual hygiene film from 1919, using it to illustrate the fraught relationship between sex and money in post-World War I American culture. The publishers sent me a discount code if you want to buy a copy of the book. Use BB130 here to get 30% off. (Or just get it from the library!)

“Digital Humanities”

In The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice. Editors: Kearney MC and Kackman M. 331-346. Routledge, New York, NY 2018.

This is an overview, history, and typology of digital humanities within the field of media studies. It also contains a step-by-step walkthrough of a digital humanities project I created. I think this will be really helpful for anyone trying to figure out what the heck DH is and how people go about building DH projects.

Over the last few years, enrollment in my Introduction to Digital Humanities class has been trending steadily upward, as has enrollment in the minor itself. Last spring, we had an unexpected surge in enrollment in the minor, and many of those students needed to take DH101 right away. We had to scramble a bit to accommodate everyone. After considering a few possibilities, we more or less doubled the size of our Intro class, from 45 to 88 students. We were fortunate to enlist an excellent T.A., Dustin O’Hara, to teach two sections, and my fabulous longtime co-conspirator, Francesca Albrezzi, took the other two. (We have lectures twice a week and section once a week.)

Even with the expanded class size, we had to turn lots of people away; I suspect we could fill another DH101 class in the spring, if we had the faculty bandwidth to teach it.

This was my first time teaching a true lecture course. In previous versions of DH101, I’ve been able to alternate between dispensing information and turning discussion over to the students. While we still had discussions in the larger DH101, I could no longer pretend this was a seminar.

I expected the large class size to be a challenge, but I think the bigger challenge was the classroom itself. We were lucky to find a room at all, given how late we transitioned to a larger class size, but we were stuck with a very conventional lecture hall, with bolted-down seats in immovable rows. It at least had modern AV equipment, but the room was a significant challenge. In my previous classroom, students’ seats were arranged in 10 or so group tables, so it was easy to alternate between hands-on work and all-eyes-up-front lecturing. Now we had no choice but to sit lecture-style.

I did what I could to ameliorate the situation. I was able to reserve the Young Research Library main conference room on a few occasions, which gave us a chance to work more collaboratively. And I did continue asking the students to check in, share work with each other, and discuss issues in small groups in the lecture hall. But the space just didn’t really lend itself to that kind of thing. This was a real bummer for me, and probably for the students, too.

The classroom arrangement actually set us back significantly in terms of technical skills, too. I wasn’t really comfortable asking students to learn technical stuff when I couldn’t circulate freely in the classroom to see how they were doing. I don’t think a lecture hall is a good environment for learning new skills on your computer, since it’s so easy to get stuck and have no way to signal for help without stopping the entire class. So technical tutorials had to be reserved for section, for the rare occasions when I could reserve the Library conference room, and for a few at-home lessons. As a result, I wasn’t able to teach the students as many skills as I have in years past.

I also struggled to check in with students as much as I’ve been used to doing. Their group project is always really challenging for them, and every project is very different. Since I’m the one who picks out the datasets, I usually like to work at least a little bit with every group. But with so many students, I had a hard time devoting attention to everyone. The result was more confusion about the assignment and expectations than in previous years, and a couple of group meltdowns. Everyone pushed through and got to the finish line, thanks in large part to the TAs’ hard work, but it was more stressful than it needed to be.

The students’ final project showcase this week reassured me that, yes, they did learn what I wanted them to, and, yes, they did learn how to do serious research and think critically about data. I loved hearing them explain what they did and how they overcame challenges, and I was really excited to hear their newfound confidence in discussing technical matters. Still, as always, it’s my errors that stand out to me.

If the class remains this size next year (and I’m still the one teaching it), there are a few things I’d do differently.

Other miscellaneous thoughts about this year’s DH101:

The quarter is off and running again at lightning speed. At UCLA, we’re on the quarter system, and things move fast — just 10 weeks to get through all your material. I’m teaching DH101 again this year, and, as usual, it’s a race against the clock. The profile of my students changes a bit every year, but the typical student who enters my DH101 classroom has facility with Word, PowerPoint, maybe Excel, maybe some of the Adobe suite, but not a ton of other computer stuff. By the end of the quarter, my goal is to get them working with and thinking critically about structured data, data cleaning, data visualization, mapping, and web design.

I’ve written about this before: working in groups, my students are assigned a dataset at the beginning of the quarter. They learn how to work with it as the quarter progresses, doing a lot of secondary contextual research, interviewing an expert about it, manipulating the data, and finally building a website that makes a scholarly humanistic argument with the support of the data. You can see the mechanics of this on my course website.

People often ask me about the data I use, and indeed, that is a story in itself. I have 88 students this year, and since I don’t like any group to have more than seven people in it, I have 12 groups, each of which needs a dataset. (Really, some of them can share the same dataset; I don’t know why I get weird about this.) And they can’t just use any dataset. In fact, most of the data out there is inappropriate for them.

Here is what I look for in a dataset for my students:

  1. It has to be a CSV (or able to be wrangled into a CSV). My beginners want to be able to double-click on their dataset and see…something that they can work with. CSVs are great because they open in Excel, which is familiar to most students and allows them to immediately start doing things like filtering and simple manipulation. Plus, you can drop a CSV into almost any visualization tool. I can use a relational database, but I usually just give the students the spreadsheet that results from a query, since I just don’t have time in the quarter to teach them about more complicated data structures. Likewise, if a dataset is XML, I’ll just flatten it. But I prefer not to have to deal with this because, like I said, 12 datasets.
  2. Around 2,000 records is ideal. Here’s why: I want the dataset to be big enough that it’s too labor-intensive for the students to manipulate it by hand, but not so big that it breaks Excel. Really, I can work with bigger sets, too, but students do tend to get very anxious about working with datasets that big. Any number of fields is fine (actually more is better) because students understand fairly quickly that they can choose which fields to examine.
  3. It has to be…humanities-ish. You and I probably know that one could make a humanities argument about municipal water data, or public health information, but it takes a little bit of sophistication to get there. The most “natural” kind of analysis for these kinds of datasets would be urban planning or public health kinds of questions, and it’s too difficult for me to push students toward the kind of open-ended humanities questions I want them to pursue. It’s far easier if the data is about art, books, movies — subjects that are the traditional province of the humanities.
  4. It’s nice if it’s something they care about. I have confidence that my students will eventually become interested in any subject, once they really dig into it, but I can forestall a lot of grumbling if I can give them a dataset that’s immediately compelling to them. Things they like: fashion, food, performance, books from their youth, cartoons, comic books, TV, movies.

You can see this year’s datasets at the bottom of this page. I do not just give my students their datasets in raw form. I cut the sets down to an appropriate number of records, if necessary, and then I give them the dataset along with a “project brief,” which contains:

  1. Information about the provenance and composition of the data.
  2. The name and contact info of an expert on that subject who has agreed to allow my students to interview them.
  3. The names and contact info of librarians who can help them.
  4. The name and contact info of UCLA’s mapping specialist.
  5. Two or three secondary sources to get them going on their research. I also teach them how to citation-chain.

Here is an example of a “data package,” with the contact info removed.

If you’re thinking this is kind of an absurd amount of work for the instructor, you’re right. I really feel the students need this apparatus around their dataset, but I end up spending a good chunk of my summer hunting down data, persuading friends (and strangers) to serve as subject experts, and researching secondary sources.

Even with all of this scaffolding, students get very anxious about the project assignment, just because it’s so new to them. I’ve learned to expect it, to warn them that they’ll feel anxious about it, and to reassure them that if they’re hitting project milestones, they’ll get to the finish line on time, even if they feel at sea.

Sorry for the dashed-off blog post; I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time and finally had a few (just a few!) minutes!

View from window with trees and blue sky.

Never gonna give you up, beloved office window! I fought hard for this! (Used to be Chris Kelty’s! [I did not kick him out.])

I can never keep my mouth shut, so this announcement already made the rounds on social media, but I’m really excited about my remodeled job title: as of July 1, I’m an assistant professor of Information Studies and Digital Humanities (still at UCLA!). For those who care about such things, the appointment is 100% in IS, but I’ll continue to do half my teaching for the DH program.

I’m really happy. I’ve always loved my job at UCLA, but over the last few years, I’ve grown increasingly invested in a couple of research projects: the first, on the way data works under supply-chain capitalism; and the second, on what “data” means for the humanities more broadly. My new position will give me the time and resources I need to work on these projects. I’ve always felt very close to the i-School at UCLA — both to the people and to the questions they’re asking. It’s a really good fit.

When I came to UCLA for my job interview, Todd Presner, who became my boss, told me that the job I was interviewing for seemed to make sense for someone to hold for about five years. Five-and-a-half years later, that seems about right to me. I wasn’t really sure where I’d go after that time elapsed; I came close to moving into a higher-level administrative job, but in the end, I felt pulled to research and teaching.

I’m just really, really glad I had that option, and really glad I get to do it at UCLA, a place I genuinely and cheesily care about a lot. I’m very grateful for the mentors I’ve had to help me figure out how to navigate all this, and especially for Todd (who hates it when I say this).

Best of all: UCLA will be replacing “my” position as coordinator of the DH program, although I know they won’t be looking for a Miriam clone. I’m extremely excited about what it will mean to bring in someone with different and fresh ideas about DH. You can see, I think, that this is a pretty significant investment in DH at UCLA, and I think it will be good for all of us.