Projects

Data Sousveillance: An analysis of cultural and congressional surveillance rhetoric over time
http://research.prattsils.org/surveillance/

This was a group project for my Digital Humanities II course which ultimately resulted in a presentation at the Cultural Studies Association conference in June 2016. We used a sentiment analysis tool on a varied corpus of sources concerning surveillance from mainstream media, alternative news sources, popular culture and the congressional record. My partner and I gathered sources relating to the congressional record, and I wrote code to modify the Sunlight Foundation’s congressional records parser for our uses. This python script took entries from the congressional record and transformed them into an XML format where the congressional record entries were tagged and nested by who was speaking. From there I also constructed a Python script that ingested those parsed xml documents and created a new file for each speaker containing only that speaker’s material.These scripts, along with the others written by people working on the project reside at: https://github.com/ldparadise/datasousveillance.

American Aviatrixes: Women with Wings –
http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/american-aviatrixes

For my Reference Services and Sources course, this was a group project for the Digital Public Library of America, where we used digital objects available through the website to create an online exhibit regarding American women in early aviation history. This project involved research into this period of history so that we could write succinct and engaging captioning to tell these women’s story. We also had to locate copyright or gain permissions for any photos or artifacts we were using from outside the site.

Women Behind the Page and On the Page in Comics: No Longer in Refrigerators?http://dh.prattsils.org/blog/projects/student/women-behind-the-page-and-on-the-page-in-comics-no-longer-in-refrigerators/

This was an individual project for my Digital Humanities course where I sought to analyze the overall state of women in the comic book industry, both as artists and writers and as characters. I used a web scraper to pull data from fan-curated comic wikia to be analyzed to track what the percentage of content was created by women writers and artists, whether any increase of women’s input was impacting the proportion of a publisher’s output that was female-centered. By comparing the output of the two major publishers of Marvel and DC to the creator-owned publisher of Image, I also tried to see if women tended to be assigned female character-fronted titles more often, and additionally, if their comic were creator-owned, if the titles they wrote or drew were more often female-centered. The overall trend seemed to be that women are becoming more represented but are still a very small portion of titles on the newstand, and a small portion of creative credits, despite the fact that the percentage of comic book readers which are women has been increasing hugely in recent years to now stand at 40%.

Digital Dysentery:  Fording the River of Digital Obsolescence – 
https://digitaldysentery.wordpress.com

This was a group project for my Information Technology course. Our group created a website intended to be an entertaining resource for librarians or information professionals facing the issue of digital obsolescence. The site discussed concerns including copyright and collections development. I authored the section compiling advice and useful tools for digital preservation and contributed to the overall look and organization of the site.

The LO*OP Center Virtual Museum
http://loop.prattsils.org/

Our Projects in Digital Archives class took a portion of the items from the collection of the History of Computers in Learning and Education project to create a finding aid for that portion of the collection, contribute to their ongoing entering of metadata for the collection and create an online exhibition regarding the efforts of the project’s parent organization the LO*OP center to bring computers into the classroom.  The media in this portion of the collection consisted of files on a few 3.5″ disks and a 5.25″ disk, and of video recordings on Betamax cassettes.  The entire class took on different portions of the project, and the group I was in engaged with curatorial tasks involved in getting this virtual exhibit online. We assisted in the digitization of the different artifacts, summarized what was contained in the digital materials and selected which materials should be included within the collection, and what portion of those should be used online. We also did research both into the work of Liza Loop and her organization, and into the early use of computers in learning and education as a field, delivering this information to the team tasked in building the website, and the team working with the metadata for this project.