The village woman explores Digital Humanities
As a new comer in the DH field, I found Sharon Daniel’s Public Secrets project very compelling and chose to explore it as my class project for the Digital Humanities class of September 3rd, 2013. This Public Secrets project was designed by Erik Loyer. See details: http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=57. http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/4/publicsecrets/
About the Project – The State’s massive prison system – houses three prisons with the two largest women’s prisons in the world – is a rapidly expanding industry in Central California. Public Secrets project committed to and categorized for oral history and scholarly communications was, therefore, designed to project the voices and experiences of incarcerated women within the prison system.
My Interest in Public Secrets Project – I chose Public Secrets project because I find it ideal and related to my own research interest. I am interested in working with communities and hope to focus on the use and development of information and communications technologies for social inclusion. I want to provide and frame, like Daniel, a context with and for the community of my interest. My research data will comprise collection of stories, conducting interviews, sourcing for archival materials. And I hope to build online archives, and make the data available across national, social, cultural, economic, and religious boundaries.
Goal: (What is the project trying to achieve?) Public Secrets tries to use DH to:
1) expose the multiple social problems and cost of incarceration within Central California’ prison system;
2) examine prisons from the inside out so that the physical, psychological and ideological spaces can be reconfigured;
3) To dissipate misconceptions about the nature of prisons and expose the abusive and violence within the walls
4) To make more public the social ills that prison system perpetuate, how it impacts the society and how to improve the system so it could be a more humane world.
Methods: (How does the project pursue those goals?)
Sharon Daniel pursued these goals by conducting a one on one interview with incarcerated women. She also made it available to the online academic community and requested for feedback. She also created links for her audience to participate and/or be involved in the project. Through a thoughtful and respectful framing of individual women’s voice and experiences in a unique context, the online academic community becomes part of the violent public secrets world.
Scholarly contexts: How does the project tries to advance humanities scholarship?
The Public Secrets project tries to advance humanities scholarship in the under listed ways:
- Retrieving oral history of incarcerated women whose voices ordinarily would not have been heard.
- Archiving these stories
- Preserving research data/findings in ways that the information could be available to a greater audience
Project Development:
i) How was the project created?
Daniel and Loyer employed a combination of treemap and typographic algorithms. This program helps to shrink phrases in ways that fits quite well in the program. Content conforms exactly to the dimensions of structure that encloses it. That is, whatever is programmed takes its own form and shape without losing any information. This program also solves aesthetic problem.
ii) Who was involved with the project?
Project Public Secrets was made possible through the collaborative effort of:
1) Erik Loyer, the designer who used “Squarified” treemap algorithm;
2) Sound effects provided by The Freesound Project collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds;
3) Justice Now, Co-directors Cassandra shaylor and Cynthia Chandler;
4) Proof reading experts;
5) Assistance with audio production, audio recording facilities;
6) And support provided by the Digital Arts and News Media MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Strengths: What does the project do well?
I find the graphic descriptions of prison conditions quite fascinating. The narratives each has a link that connects to a considerable amount of textual information that has been broken down from its original state and split up into short paragraphs.
As you click on a link, statement by a particular woman unfolds. And you can listen to it or just read the transcript. Buttons labeled “more” or “view connections” allows you to follow the thread of a given statement to a new screen containing related content. By rolling over the strip at the left, you can access the three sections of the project, or return to this screen.
The most fascinating thing about this design is the capability to shrink information to a sizeable and available space. I guess in this way, every voice and information is not left out.
Weakness:
As noted in the Strength of the project, textual information was broken up into short paragraphs from the original narrative. I consider the style of breaking up narratives into short paragraphs without labeling it a weakness. Reading these narrative gives a sense of disconnect
Award:
I thought it is interesting to state that the skills, ingenuity and vision of Public Secrets has been acknowledged as it was voted the Oscars of the Internet by NY Times and The Webby Awards for exhibiting remarkable achievements on the Internet, Websites, Interactive Advertising, online film and Video, and the mobile Websites.
